Latest Research
AIDA: Artificial intelligence applied to space!
Imagine waking up in the morning, finding an android that prepares tea and then accompanies you to work. Another is waiting for you in the office and then there is one that answers your e-mails. They behave like us because they have learned to think like us, to act like us, simply by observing and memorizing data. Well, now stop imagining, because everything is already happening. Like in the best movies science fiction on artificial intelligence, our society is now invaded by machines, programmed for understand us, to repeat our actions. Science has been using it for many years but only recently the computing power is making this approach feasible.
AIDA (Artificial Inteligence Data Analysis) is a scientific project funded by the European Community, as part of the Horizon 2020 program (COMPET-4). AIDA has a total cost of 1.5 million euros and involves reserachers form universities and companies in 6 countries (Belgium, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece and the USA). This interdisciplinary collaboration will be devoted to artificial intelligence, applied to the analysis of spatial data. At KU Leuven, a team of scientists from the Department of Mathematics will build the "pieces" of this algorithm.
Experiments and numerical modeling of wave propagation in Penning traps
The propagation of near-acoustic plasma waves in Penning-Malmberg traps is investigated through laboratory experiments in collaboration with the Nonneutral Plasmas group at University of California at San Diego (USA). Support to the interpretation of the results of experimental measurements is provided by numerical simulations of the drift-kinetic Poisson equations, through which we are able to model the wave excitation process in the fashion of real laboratory experiments. See, for example, F. Anderegg et al., PoP 2009.
Velocity-space cascade in turbulent weakly collisional plasmas
Eulerian simulations of the kinetic dynamics of plasmas allow for a clean very low-noise description of the particle distribution function. Using a hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell model, recently we investigate the possibility of a velocity-space cascade. A novel theory of space plasma turbulence has been recently proposed by Servidio et al. (PRL, 2017), supported by a three-dimensional Hermite decomposition applied to spacecraft measurements, showing that velocity space fluctuations of the ion velocity distribution follow a broad-band, power-law Hermite spectrum. Numerical simulations are able to reproduce the phenomenology recovered in space data and agree very well with theoretical predicions (see O. Pezzi et al. PoP, 2018).
Interpretation of in situ measurements from spacecraft
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Numerical simulations are a key ingredient to support the interpretation of in situ measurements from spacecraft. The computational power of modern supercomputers give nowadays the possibility of running multi-dimensional kinetic simulations in physical conditions very close to reality. By launching a virtual satellite through the output of these simulations we can model real spacecraft measurements and help providing support to the understanding of the physical processes occurring in the near-Earth environment (see, for example, S. Perri et al., APJS 2017).
