Particle-in-Cell Simulations with Kinetic Electrons

  • Authors:

  • J. L. V. Lewandowski

  • Affiliations:

  • Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, P.O. Box 451, Princeton, New Jersey 08543. jlewando@pppl.gov

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Scientific Computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

A new scheme, based on an exact separation between adiabatic and nonadiabatic electron responses, for particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of drift-type modes is presented. The (linear and nonlinear) elliptic equations for the scalar fields are solved using a multigrid solver. The new scheme yields linear growth rates in excellent agreement with theory and it is shown to conserve energy well into the nonlinear regime. It is also demonstrated that simulations with few electrons are reliable and accurate, suggesting that large-scale, PIC simulations with electron dynamics in toroidal geometry (e.g., tokamaks and stellarators plasmas) are within reach of present-day massively-parallel supercomputers.