Hybrid Plasma Simulations of Farley-Buneman Instabilities in the Auroral E-Region

We implemented a hybrid continuous solver for fluid electrons and kinetic ions. Because the simulation is continuous, numerical noise is not an issue as it is for particle-in-cell approaches. Moreover, given that the ion kinetic equation is solved using a characteristic based method, no particle pushes have to be done. Our main goals are to reduce the computational cost of the simulations proposed by Kovalev (Kovalev et al., 2008, ) and reproduce the main experimental features of Farley-Buneman instabilities measured by radars and rockets. The equations were derived from first principles using the approximations that are satisfied in the auroral E-region. Various tests will be presented to assess numerical accuracy. With the proposed numerical framework, we are able to recover important nonlinear features associated with Farley-Buneman instabilities: wave turning of dominant modes, and saturation of density irregularities at values consistent with experiments.