A Quantitative Comparison of Multipoint Magnetic Field Reconstruction Methods

Authors: Theodore Broeren (University of Arizona), Kristopher Klein (University of Arizona)

The upcoming NASA mission HelioSwarm will use nine spacecraft to make simultaneous measurements of solar wind space plasmas spanning characteristic plasma scales. The space plasma community will attempt to leverage the resulting in-situ magnetometer measurements to reconstruct the magnetic field around the configuration of spacecraft. We provide a comparison of a variety of reconstruction techniques that could be applied to this forthcoming data by generating synthetic spacecraft observations generated from a numerical simulation of turbulence. This comparison quantifies the topological accuracy of the reconstructed fields using each method. As it may be desirable to reconstruct magnetic fields with the same distribution of small-scale fluctuations as the underlying magnetic field, we also quantify how well each of these techniques reproduce the scale-dependent statistical properties of the turbulent fields.