I graduated several years ago from the Space Plasma Physics
Research Group in the School of Electrical Engineering at
Cornell University. I defended my thesis during the summer
of 1996. My minor study was in computational physics, and
while at Cornell I focused my studies on computational
modeling of space plasmas. My thesis research was conducted
under both Niels Otani and Charles Seyler.
My thesis project involves computer
modelling of the ionospheric source for oxygen ions in
the magnetosphere. This involves both a fluid
simulation and a particle hybrid simulation to study
the transverse acceleration of ions due to lower
hybrid waves in the topside of the auroral ionosphere.
The problem with this situation that the cold,
ionospheric ions (especially atomic oxygen ions) are
too cold to overcome the gravitational bounds to reach
the magnetosphere (where they have been detected). One
mechanism proposed to accelerate these ions is a
resonant interaction with lower hybrid waves. However,
the lower hybrid wave, presumably generated by the
precipitating auroral electrons have too high a phase
velocity to interact with the cold ions. The basic
hypothesis of my thesis is that the presence of a
small (1-2%) density depletion alters the dispersion
properties of a lower hybrid wave significantly. The
subsequent interaction of the lower hybrid wave with
the density depletion causes a transfer of wave energy
to slower phase velocity modes which can then interact
with the cold ionospheric ions and transversely
accelerate them. During the course of my graduate
study, I have developed both MHD fluid and
particle-in-cell simulation codes to study processes
involving the coupling of the auroral ionosphere and
magnetosphere. These codes have required knowledge of
Fortran, C, and C++ programming languages as well as
the Unix operating system.