Technical Article

Energetic particle acceleration and transport with the novel Icarus + PARADISE model

¹ Centre for Mathematical Plasma Astrophysics, Department of Mathematics, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200B, 3001 Leuven, Belgium
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, 20014 Turku, Finland
³ Institute of Physics, University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska, ul. Radziszewskiego 10, 20-031 Lublin, Poland

^* Corresponding author: edin.husidic@kuleuven.be

Received: 2 October 2023
Accepted: 26 March 2024

Abstract

With the rise of satellites and mankind’s growing dependence on technology, there is an increasing awareness of space weather phenomena related to high-energy particles. Shock waves driven by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and corotating interaction regions (CIRs) occasionally act as potent particle accelerators, generating hazardous solar energetic particles (SEPs) that pose risks to satellite electronics and astronauts. Numerical simulation tools capable of modelling and predicting large SEP events are thus highly demanded. We introduce the new Icarus + PARADISE model as an advancement of the previous EUHFORIA + PARADISE model. Icarus, based on the MPI-AMRVAC framework, is a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic code that models solar wind configurations from 0.1 au onwards, encompassing transient structures like CMEs or CIRs. Differing from EUHFORIA’s uniform-only grid, Icarus incorporates solution adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and grid stretching. The particle transport code PARADISE propagates energetic particles as test particles through these solar wind configurations by solving the focused transport equation in a stochastic manner. We validate our new model by reproducing EUHFORIA + PARADISE results. This is done by modelling the acceleration and transport of energetic particles in a synthetic solar wind configuration containing an embedded CIR. Subsequently, we illustrate how the simulation results vary with grid resolution by employing different levels of AMR. The resulting intensity profiles illustrate increased particle acceleration with higher levels of AMR in the shock region, better capturing the effects of the shock.