A Particle-in-cell Method with Adaptive Phase-space Remapping for Kinetic Plasmas

  • Authors:

  • B. Wang;G. H. Miller;P. Colella

  • Affiliations:

  • beiwang@ucdavis.edu;grgmiller@ucdavis.edu;colella@hpcrdm.lbl.gov

  • Venue:
  • SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We present a new accurate and efficient particle-in-cell (PIC) method for computing the dynamics of one-dimensional kinetic plasmas. The method overcomes the numerical noise inherent in particle-based methods by periodically remapping the distribution function on a hierarchy of locally refined grids in phase space. Remapping on phase-space grids also provides an opportunity to integrate a collisional model and an associated grid-based solver. The positivity of the distribution function is enforced by redistributing excess phase-space density in a local neighborhood. We demonstrate the method on a number of standard plasma physics problems. It is shown that remapping significantly reduces the numerical noise and results in a more consistent second-order method than the standard PIC method. An error analysis is presented which is based on prior results of Cottet and Raviart's work [SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 21 (1984), pp. 52-76].