Data from: Plasma refilling of the lunar wake: Plasma-vacuum interactions, electrostatic shocks, and electromagnetic instabilities

A plasma void forms downstream of the Moon when the solar wind impacts the
lunar surface. This void gradually refills as the solar wind passes by,
forming the lunar wake. We investigate this refilling process using a
fully kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The early stage of
refilling follows plasma-vacuum interaction theory, characterized by
exponential decay of plasma density into the wake, along with ion
acceleration and cooling in the expansion direction. Our PIC simulation
confirms these theoretical predictions. In the next stage of the refilling
process, the counter-streaming supersonic ion beams collide, generating
Debye-scale electrostatic shocks at the wake's center. These shocks
decelerate and thermalize the ion beams while heating electrons into
flat-top velocity distributions along magnetic field lines. Additionally,
fast magnetosonic waves undergo convective growth via anomalous cyclotron
resonance as they co-propagate with temperature-anisotropic ion beams
toward the wake's center. Electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves may
also be excited through normal cyclotron resonance, counter-propagating
with these anisotropic ion beams. Our findings provide new insights into
the kinetic aspects of lunar wake refilling and may enhance interpretation
of spacecraft observations. The accompanying dataset comprises
PIC simulation results organized into raw data files and analysis scripts.
Field data on spatial grids are archived as .gda files, while particle
data on phase space grids are stored as .bin files in the "data"
directory. Jupyter notebooks in the "scripts" directory provide
analysis pipelines for reproducing all figures in our study. Each notebook
demonstrates complete workflows for data processing and visualization,
with detailed notebook-to-data correspondence documented in the README
file to ensure full reproducibility.