PhD Projects 2025: Space Plasma Physics

PhD projects in Space Plasma Physics for our STFC studentships 2025 are listed below.

Solar Orbiter: Solar Wind Plasma Energetics in the Inner Heliosphere

Primary Supervisor: Dr Georgios Nicolaou

Solar Orbiter was launched on 11th of February 2020, carrying 10 scientific instruments to obtain high-quality measurements of the inner heliosphere. These measurements are the key to understanding fundamental science questions which will lead to the understanding of the ways in which the Sun creates and controls the heliosphere. UCL/MSSL is the Principal Investigator (PI) Institute for an international consortium that provided and now operates the Solar Wind Analyser suite (SWA) of instruments for the Solar Orbiter mission. SWA consists of three sensors which sample electron, proton, alpha-particle, and heavy ion populations at various distances from the Sun, spanning from 0.28 au to 1 au, and from 2025 at high solar latitudes. The SWA sensors provide high-resolution measurements, enabling unique opportunities to study the dynamic processes in the solar wind plasma that are currently only poorly understood.

GN25_PhD

The available data from SWA support both case studies and statistical studies. We aim to use measurements from the SWA sensors to study the plasma energetics and variability within specific structures and within the entire heliocentric distance range covered by Solar Orbiter. The combination and careful analysis of SWA particle observations and field observations by the magnetometer (MAG) and the Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instruments, will reveal dynamic mechanisms involving energy transfer between the particles and electromagnetic fields. For instance, the development and application of sophisticated analysis tools will determine the radial profiles of the plasma kinetic properties and the electromagnetic fields, which we will then compare with existing models involving particle heating. Moreover, there are numerous opportunities to investigate the kinetic features of the plasma particles in response to electromagnetic field variations in specific structures of various scales, such as reconnection events, magnetic field reversals, and more.  

This PhD project offers the opportunity to undertake coordinated studies with data from other missions, such as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.

The results of this project are critical to the success of the overall ESA Solar Orbiter programme, and the student will thus also be an integral part of the MSSL science and science-planning teams. There will also be opportunity to collaborate with our partners in Europe and the USA. This project will place the student in a good position to collaborate more generally and to find future positions e.g. within the international Solar Orbiter community.

Desired Knowledge and Skills

  • Undergraduate degree in physics or closely related topic
  • Strong computational skills
  • Strong interest in data analysis

Signatures and dynamics of substorms in the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere system

Primary Supervisor: Dr Colin Forsyth

The substorm is a key component of magnetospheric and ionospheric dynamics, with impacts that include a rapid enhancement in the nightside aurora, magnetic disturbances on the ground, enhancements in the ring current and radiation belts and heating of plasma further out in the magnetosphere. Substorms release ~1 PJ (1015 J) of energy in ~30 min, with approximately half of this energy being dumped into the atmosphere. This energy release and the processes associated with it have the potential to be harmful to technology in space and on the ground, making substorms a key component of space weather.

In the standard substorm model, substorms have three phases: a growth phase of ~1 hour during which reconnection between the magnetosphere and the solar wind adds energy into Earth’s magnetotail; an expansion phase lasting ~20 min in which some of this energy is rapidly released, creating bright aurora and reconfiguring Earth’s magnetic field; and a recovery phase that lasts 1-2 hours during which energy continues to be released but at a decreasing rate and the system begins to return to the pre-substorm state. Recent work (Forsyth et al., 2015; Lao et al., 2024) has shown that this three-phase model is often not adhered to in reality and that the “typical” signatures of substorms are often not seen coincident with one another. Several of these signatures have previously been linked to specific dynamics in the magnetotail, namely the occurrence of fast plasma flows and the build-up of the substorm current wedge.

This project aims to improve our understanding of the substorm processes within the magnetosphere, placing observations of the signatures of reconnection, magnetotail reconfiguration and plasma instabilities in relative context: 
(i)  comparing the relative timing of different in-situ and remotely detected substorm signatures including electrojet enhancements, mid-latitude bays and magnetospheric fast flows;
(ii)  determining the conditions in the magnetosphere and ionosphere for substorm events with different combinations of onset signatures;
(iii)  examining differences in auroral signatures associated with different magnetospheric and ionospheric substorm signatures.

This project will involve the examination of a variety of data sources including in-situ observations from missions such as Cluster, THEMIS and MMS as well as ground-based data from magnetometer chains and auroral all-sky cameras. The project will make use of recent alignments through the magnetosphere of the in-situ observations which are yet to be fully understood and data from the upcoming SMILE mission.

Desired Knowledge and Skills

  • Undergraduate degree in Physics, with a strong interest in solar or space plasma physics
  • Strong computational skills in a relevant programming language (IDL, Matlab, Python)
  • Good statistical and mathematical skills