I'm published!!!

Whew! It's been a long journey. I started this research with Dr. Anton Artemyev under Dr. Vassilis Angelopolous back in June of 2016. At the time, I didn't know much about space plasma physics at all. Chaotic motion? Hot and cold ions? Current sheets and magnetospheres? What on Earth?!?

Over the course of about a month, I read countless other papers and started to get a good feel for the problem. Essentially, Earth is a big magnet and the magnetic field gets deformed by the stream of particles coming from our sun. As it gets deformed, the magnetic field on the side of Earth facing away from the sun gets squeezed into a sort of tail. This is called the current sheet and at thinner locations of the current sheet, there exists a particular curvature of the magnetic field so that the ions don't exhibit normal predictable behavior and it becomes difficult to model.

My goal was to model the motion of these particles, which is definitely not easy since (a) I had no idea what equations governed these plasmas and (b) I had no intuition for what to expect and (c) nobody had done this before. All throughout my life, I have been a student where none of those three points were true. Looking back, I would definitely rank this as one of the most difficult hurdles thus far. Of course, my mentor, Anton, helped me immensely. For him, he somehow had an idea of what the results were supposed to be — kind of like if we were stranded in a desert, I would be totally clueless, but Anton would innately just know there is a flowing river on the other side of the sand dune — Anton just always knew what the next steps were.

After about 2 months-worth of climbing this proverbial sand dune, I finally struggled through enough theory to calculate some basic current sheet properties. It wasn't easy, as the mathematical methods we used varied quite a bit from from what I’ve typically seen in undergraduate physics classes and I couldn't even make sense of the results at first. Numerical calculations often took overnight on my dinky Macbook Air; many times I woke up, jumped out of bed, and rushed to my computer only to be disappointed with a math error, impossible results, or simply results I had no idea how to interpret. Eventually, though, I was able to not just model these particles, but use the motion of these particles to calculate the actual current density of the current sheet itself! This is huge; since the methods I used were purely theoretical but based off of spacecraft measurements, you can apply this theory to any current sheet that exhibits these properties to estimate many properties of a high pressure plasma system, whether it be Earth, Jupiter, or another unknown planet. The coolest realization though? I just did something that nobody had ever done before. I had just extended the boundary of human knowledge a teeny tiny bit. That was a pretty incredible feeling.

At this point, I was told that I had enough data that could publish and I remember going "Fantastic! Who's writing it?"

Well, uh...me...apparently. 

I started writing in August and the one thing it really did was expose how much knowledge I was still taking for granted. Why don't we take into account the natural drift of particles into the transient particle population? What does the doubly averaged particle velocity even tell me? I wrote and wrote and scratched things out and rewrote. It really was difficult to write about something that I frankly had such a superficial understanding of. Each question I had about one topic ripped opened a sinkhole of new questions and problems. By October, I had probably read through another stack of physics papers, but I had a first draft!

I still remember Anton's initial reaction; in his classic Russian-English, it was something along the lines of, "Your meaning is ok, but we must write in a more 'scientific' manner." In other words, back to the drawing board. It took 2 more months of consistent work until I had a submittable paper. It’s one thing to be able to do something novel, but it’s a whole other level to be able to contextualize your work and convince experts that your work is bulletproof. I submitted to the American Institute of Phyiscs, Physics of Plasma journal on Dec. 8th and after a quick revision, it got approved! If you'd like to read it, the link is here:

http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4975017

I’ve also made my code available to download here:

Click this link to download a zip file containing my matlab code.

I'm excited to keep working on ELFIN and pursue some more research topics as time goes on!

Also, the publishers at PoP seemed to like my paper and did a little feature on Scilights!! (warning pdf download on mobile)

For now, cheers!