Neural Operator based Multi-Field Reconstruction of Inner Solar Boundary State
Organizations: Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University Atlanta, USA · Predictive Sciences Inc. San Diego, USA
Abstract
The Solar wind is a continuous flow of charged particles emanating from the solar surface and governed by complex, interacting magnetohydrodynamic processes. Accurate specification of inner-boundary conditions is essential for heliospheric modeling and solar-wind prediction. In many practical applications, only a subset of interacting multi-field variables is directly available, but for a comprehensive view of solar wind prediction and downstream magnetohydrodynamic simulations, a more complete boundary state is required. In this work, we study the problem of learning the multi-field multi-scale solar magnetohydrodynamic state at 30 solar radii () using operator learning. Specifically, given the radial velocity and radial magnetic field, we aim to reconstruct the non-radial velocity and magnetic field components, radial and non-radial current density, thermodynamic density, and pressure components. This mapping is highly nonlinear, spatially coupled, and multi-scale, making it a challenging task for data-driven scientific machine learning. To address this problem, we employ a Local Neural Operator (LocalNO) that learns mappings between input and output function spaces while retaining locality and resolution-awareness. Unlike conventional regression models and autoencoder models, neural operators are better suited for learning structured field-to-field transformations arising from physical systems. The resulting predictions along with inputs are intended to serve as boundary condition variables for future inner-heliospheric modeling pipelines.
Figures & tables
| Rank | ACC | EMD | MSE | NNSE | PSNR | UQI | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | |
| 0.2 | 0.9833 | 0.0241 | 0.0097 | 0.0194 | 0.0070 | 0.0192 | 0.9676 | 0.0430 | 37.3505 | 9.9128 | 0.8873 | 0.1108 |
| 0.3 | 0.9830 | 0.0256 | 0.0095 | 0.0203 | 0.0058 | 0.0169 | 0.9673 | 0.0445 | 37.5967 | 10.2752 | 0.8836 | 0.1149 |
| 0.4 | 0.9874 | 0.0205 | 0.0060 | 0.0121 | 0.0040 | 0.0114 | 0.9755 | 0.0364 | 38.6972 | 10.0915 | 0.9071 | 0.0929 |
| 0.5 | 0.9874 | 0.0203 | 0.0063 | 0.0127 | 0.0043 | 0.0126 | 0.9746 | 0.0381 | 38.0046 | 9.4680 | 0.9081 | 0.0914 |
| 1.0 | 0.9787 | 0.0338 | 0.0105 | 0.0215 | 0.0078 | 0.0218 | 0.9602 | 0.0549 | 37.0086 | 11.1103 | 0.8786 | 0.1204 |
| Transformation | ACC | EMD | MSE | NNSE | PSNR | UQI | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | |
| None | 0.9823 | 0.0390 | 0.0072 | 0.0169 | 0.0052 | 0.0173 | 0.9686 | 0.0644 | 39.6712 | 10.6426 | 0.8607 | 0.1530 |
| Square-root | 0.9874 | 0.0205 | 0.0060 | 0.0121 | 0.0040 | 0.0114 | 0.9755 | 0.0364 | 38.6972 | 10.0915 | 0.9071 | 0.0929 |
| Natural Log | 0.9806 | 0.0407 | 0.0081 | 0.0193 | 0.0062 | 0.0207 | 0.9642 | 0.0728 | 39.1683 | 10.7892 | 0.8527 | 0.1603 |
| Model | Params | ACC | EMD | MSE | NNSE | PSNR | UQI | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (in M) | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | Mean | Std. | |
| SFNO | 31.65 | 0.6307 | 0.4542 | 0.0416 | 0.1106 | 0.0870 | 0.3197 | 0.7651 | 0.2274 | 28.6258 | 11.4363 | 0.5662 | 0.4028 |
| TFNO | 412.92 | 0.9488 | 0.0753 | 0.0150 | 0.0337 | 0.0194 | 0.0555 | 0.9200 | 0.0937 | 31.8203 | 8.4401 | 0.8035 | 0.1882 |
| LocalNO | 14.82 | 0.9874 | 0.0205 | 0.0060 | 0.0121 | 0.0040 | 0.0114 | 0.9755 | 0.0364 | 38.6972 | 10.0915 | 0.9071 | 0.0929 |
Enforcing Dirichlet Boundary Conditions in Operator Learning
Learning Neural Operator Surrogates for the Black Hole Accretion Code
BHAC). First, a Physics Informed Fourier Neural Operator (PINO) is trained on the special-relativistic resistive MHD (SRRMHD) evolution of the Orszag-Tang vortex over a range of resistivities spanning the Sweet-Parker and fast reconnection regimes. By embedding the governing equations as an additional loss term evaluated at finer temporal resolution than the available data supervision, the model learns dynamics at time steps where no simulation data is provided, enabling recovery of plasmoid formation that a data-only baseline trained on the same sparse snapshots fails to reproduce. To our knowledge, the present work is the first application of a physics informed neural operator to special relativistic resistive MHD, and the first to investigate the capability of such models to resolve plasmoid formation in SRRMHD. In a second line of investigation, an OFormer-style Transformer Neural Operator is trained on the evolution of spine-sheath relativistic jets created with BHAC, in special-relativistic MHD (SRMHD). The model is directly applied on the adaptive mesh, highlighting the need for linear attention due to long sequences. The neural surrogate model is capable of capturing most of the major details, especially in early predictions. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first application of a neural operator directly on a high resolution adaptive mesh refinement grid in the context of MHD simulations.