XFTRISTAN: A program to visualize the interaction between solar wind and Earth's magnetosphere

Abstract

XFTRISTAN is a graphical user interface (GUI) for the tridimensional particle in cell (PIC) code called TRISTAN. The TRISTAN code has been widely used to investigate the kinetic nature of space plasma processes applied to problems ranging from solar wind–earth interaction to magnetic reconnection topology. This first XFTRISTAN version provides an easy way to enter input parameters, visualization of fields and particles, several diagnostic tools and automatic image generation. In this paper, we present the advantages and capabilities of our GUI and first simulation results.