Events

Data-Driven Closures for Hybrid Plasma Models in Space Plasmas - George Miloshevich

Centre for Theoretical Physics and Astronomy 
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Date: 27 February 2026   Time: 14:30 - 15:30

Location: Room 610, G. O. Jones, Mile End Campus

Modelling turbulence kinetically in space remains challenging due to the multiscale nature of plasma. One approach is to adopt a fluid model hierarchy and close it using a phenomenological expression or law derived from local kinetic simulations. We address this challenge from the perspective of decaying turbulence in the near-Earth magnetosheath using fully kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. We apply machine learning techniques to extract a non-local five-moment electron-pressure-tensor closure trained on these simulations. We evaluate the learned "equation of state" using energy-channel diagnostics, emphasizing the pressure–strain interaction (a key mediator of turbulence heating). The new global closure outperforms common local approaches (e.g., double-adiabatic and MLP-type closures) in reconstructing key statistics. Equation of state trained on simulations with fewer particles per cell generalises to more accurate simulations with a high number of particles per cell and different turbulent initialization, but with the same physical parameters. We couple this data-driven electron closure with kinetic ion dynamics, advancing toward hybrid kinetic simulations in which electrons are represented by a neural network-based equation of state.

Contact:  Andrew Winter
Email:  andrew.winter@qmul.ac.uk

Updated by: Andrew Winter