A Study of the Electron Cyclotron Drift Instability with Solar Wind Particle Distributions

The electron cyclotron drift instability (ECDI) is often observed in the foot of heliospheric shocks and plays an important role in heating electrons and ions in collisionless shocks, as well as supplying anomalous resistivity. Although commonly observed in quasi-perpendicular interplanetary shocks and Earth's bowshock, the ECDI is a challenging instability to study in self-consistent particle-in-cell simulations of shocks, and isolated studies of the ECDI have generally been limited to simple geometries and initial conditions. Here, we present a study of the ECDI with a variety of initial conditions relevant to shocks by employing the fully non-linear continuum Vlasov-Maxwell solver within the Gkeyll simulation framework. By drawing from in situ solar wind data, we employ realistic particle distributions to examine how deviations from an initial Maxwellian alter the growth of the instability and subsequent particle energization.