3D Simulations of Farley-Buneman turbulence demonstrates anomalous electron heating

Field aligned currents flow from the magnetosphere to the E-region ionosphere where they drive auroral electrojets. These currents often cause Farley-Buneman (FB) instabilities to develop and become turbulent. These irregularities substantially affect ionospheric conductivity, temperatures, and VHF and UHF radio wave propagation. Many of the observed characteristics of radar measurements of this region result from the nonlinear behavior of this unstable plasma. While FB waves have been studied experimentally and theoretically for five decades, about fifteen years ago, numerical simulations became an important tool in exploring the nonlinear behavior of E-region instabilities. Parallel processing now allows Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes, to to run simulations with enormous meshes in either 2-D or 3-D [1].