Lin wins at Geospace Environment Modeling Workshop

ECE ILLINOIS graduate student Mei-Yun Lin recently won the Best Student Presentation Award at the 2018 Geospace Environment Modeling Workshop for her presentation "Determining the role of nitrogen ions in the evolution of the ring current."

Held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, The Geospace Environment Modeling (GEM) Workshop is an NSF Division of Atmospheric Sciences initiative to "coordinate and focus research on the near-earth portion of geospace from the lower ionosphere to where the earth system interacts with the solar wind." The GEM program aims to support research in dynamical and structural properties of geospace for the construction of a global geospace general circulation model (GGCM) with predictive capability. 

Lin was advised by ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Raluca Ilie and also worked with fellow graduate student Yu Huang. In their presentation, the team analyzed the behavior of the contribution of both nitrogen and oxygen ions using the Hot Electron Ion Drift Integrator (HEIDI) model to assess the contribution of nitrogen ions to the ring current.

Their simulation results showed that the nitrogen ions are lost at different rates than the energetic oxygen ions due to the difference in the cross section of the charge exchange collision of nitrogen and oxygen ions with neutral geocoronal hydrogen at higher particle energies. The team's findings indicated that the presence of nitrogen ions in the ring current can impact the magnetospheric processes, leading to a faster recovery phase of a geomagnetic storm.