Preface

Abstract

The Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Maison de la Simulation, a joint laboratory at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), University of Paris-Saclay, and University of Versailles-St Quentin, organized the 15th International Conference on Numerical Modeling of Space Plasma Flows (ASTRONUM-2023) on June 26—30, 2023 in Pasadena, California, USA.The Program Committee consisted of Nikolai Pogorelov (University of Alabama in Huntsville/CSPAR, USA, chair), Edouard Audit (CEA Maison de la Simulation, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, co-chair), Wes Bethel (San Francisco State University, USA), Amitava Bhattacharjee (Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, USA), Phillip Colella (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA), Tomoyuki Hanawa (Chiba University, Japan), Maria Elena Innocenti (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany), Kanya Kusano (Nagoya University, Japan), Dongwook Lee (University of California, Santa Cruz), Jon Linker (Predictive Science Inc., USA), Anthony Mezzacappa (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA), Ewald Müller (Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany), Dongsu Ryu (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea), James Stone (Princeton University), and Gary P. Zank (University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA).The conference attracted over 90 scientists from 15 countries representing different branches of the plasma simulation community. The distinctive feature of this conference is a combination of diverse research topics, all of which are essential for performing high-resolution, continuum mechanics and particle, simulations of physical phenomena in space physics and astrophysics. Among such topics were software packages for modeling and analyzing plasma flows; advanced numerical methods for space and astrophysical flows; large-scale fluid-based, kinetic, and hybrid simulations; turbulence and cosmic ray transport; and magnetohydrodynamics. The discussed applications included cosmology and galaxy formation, supernova explosions, physics of the Sun-heliosphere-magnetosphere environments, space weather, the interstellar medium and star formation, stellar physics, experimental plasma physics, astrophysical accretion, numerical methods for ideal and non-ideal, relativistic and nonrelativistic MHD, etc. The proceedings volume is structured so that it covers all of these topics.The structure of the ASTRONUM conference series is based on the idea that modelers working in seemingly distant fields should have an opportunity to share their scientific achievements with the broad community of computational scientists performing numerical experiments. As in previous ASTRONUM meetings, we were interested in physical systems that are coupled across a multiplicity of spatial and temporal that incorporate diverse physical processes.The contributors to this volume are both young researchers and renowned experts in space physics and astrophysics, applied mathematics, and computational physics. This volume describes the application of numerical methods and the algorithms themselves, allowing us to discuss the challenges that theory imposes on numerical schemes for solving partial differential equations describing collisional and collisionless processes in space and astrophysical plasmas.We would like to thank the participants who submitted their papers to Proceedings of ASTRONUM-2023 and especially to those who reviewed manuscripts thus ensuring the high quality of this publication. We also are grateful to Adele Corona (ICNSMeetings.com) for the excellent management of the conference.This publication will be useful to graduate and postgraduate students majoring in space physics, astrophysics, numerical, engineering, and applied mathematics. It is also aimed at specialists in applied mathematics and various fields of physics that involve flows of partially ionized plasmas at both the collisional and collisionless levels.Nikolai V. Pogorelov, Edouard Audit, and Gary P. ZankMarch 3, 2024