Contents
Abstract
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Collisionless Plasmas
1.2 Energetic Electrons
1.3 Electron Behaviour
1.3.1 Fermi acceleration
1.4 Collisionless Shocks
1.4.1 Rankine-Hugoniot relations
1.4.2 Shock frames
1.4.3 Shock structure
1.5 Overview of Thesis
2 Electron Acceleration in Solar Flares
2.1 Solar Flares
2.1.1 Classification
2.1.2 Two ribbon flare model
2.2 Accelerated Electron Observations
2.3 Flare Models
2.3.1 Flare top reconnection
2.3.2 Fragmented energy release
2.4 Acceleration Processes
2.4.1 Stochastic acceleration
2.4.2 Direct electric field (DC) acceleration
2.4.3 Shock acceleration
2.5 Comparison with Earth's bow shock
2.6 Summary
3 Numerical Simulation of Collisionless Shocks
3.1 Shock Simulation Methods
3.1.1 Plasma simulation models
3.1.2 Shock generation
3.2 The CAM-CL Hybrid Algorithm
3.3 Test Particle Schemes
3.4 Field Interpolation
4 Shock Surface Ripples
4.1 Previous Work
4.2 Simulation Configuration
4.3 Overview of Structure
4.4 Ripple Properties
4.5 Fourier Analysis
4.5.1 Numerical dependence
4.6 Shock Surface Modes
4.7 Summary
5 Electron Populations in a Quasi-Perpendicular Shock
5.1 Previous Work
5.1.1 Adiabatic theory
5.1.2 Simulations
5.2 Simulation Configuration
5.3 Electron Diagnostics
5.4 Electron Trajectories
5.4.1 Trapped population
5.5 Summary
6 Parametric Survey of Shock Accelerated Electrons
6.1 Spectral Properties
6.1.1 Numerical dependence
6.2 Changing Initial Conditions
6.2.1 Inflow speed
6.2.2 Shock geometry
6.2.3 Electron energy
6.3 Solar Flare Shocks
6.4 Summary
7 Summary and Conclusions
7.1 Future Work
A Beowulf Clusters and the Development of a 3D hybrid code
A.1 Beowulf Clusters
A.2 Parallel Algorithms
A.3 Hybrid Code Example
A.4 3D Code Development
B Units and Constants
C Symbols
D Acronyms
Bibliography
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Page Maintained By :
Rob Lowe
Last Revision : 1st March 2003