An implicit, conservative electrostatic particle-in-cell algorithm for paraxial magnetic nozzles

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jimenez, Pedro, Chacon, Luis, Merino, Mario
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Jimenez, Pedro
Chacon, Luis
Merino, Mario
author_facet Jimenez, Pedro
Chacon, Luis
Merino, Mario
contents An electrostatic, implicit particle-in-cell (PIC) model for collisionless, fully magnetized, paraxial plasma expansions in a magnetic nozzle is introduced with exact charge, energy, and magnetic moment conservation properties. The approach is adaptive in configuration space by the use of mapped meshes, and exploits the strict conservation of the magnetic moment to reduce the dimensionality of velocity space. A new particle integrator is implemented, which allows for particle substepping without the need to stop particle motion at every cell for charge conservation. Particle suborbits are determined from accuracy considerations, and are allowed to span multiple cells. Novel particle injection and expansion-to-infinity boundary conditions are developed, including a control loop to prevent the formation of spurious sheaths at the edges of the domain. The algorithm is verified in a periodic magnetic mirror configuration, a uniform plasma test case (to test particle injection), and a propulsive magnetic nozzle. The algorithm's computational complexity is shown to scale favorably with timestep, and linearly with the number of particles and mesh cells (unlike earlier implicit PIC implementations, which scaled quadratically with the number of mesh cells in one dimension). Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms both explicit PIC and semi-Lagrangian Vlasov codes by more than an order of magnitude.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_07146
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An implicit, conservative electrostatic particle-in-cell algorithm for paraxial magnetic nozzles
Jimenez, Pedro
Chacon, Luis
Merino, Mario
Plasma Physics
An electrostatic, implicit particle-in-cell (PIC) model for collisionless, fully magnetized, paraxial plasma expansions in a magnetic nozzle is introduced with exact charge, energy, and magnetic moment conservation properties. The approach is adaptive in configuration space by the use of mapped meshes, and exploits the strict conservation of the magnetic moment to reduce the dimensionality of velocity space. A new particle integrator is implemented, which allows for particle substepping without the need to stop particle motion at every cell for charge conservation. Particle suborbits are determined from accuracy considerations, and are allowed to span multiple cells. Novel particle injection and expansion-to-infinity boundary conditions are developed, including a control loop to prevent the formation of spurious sheaths at the edges of the domain. The algorithm is verified in a periodic magnetic mirror configuration, a uniform plasma test case (to test particle injection), and a propulsive magnetic nozzle. The algorithm's computational complexity is shown to scale favorably with timestep, and linearly with the number of particles and mesh cells (unlike earlier implicit PIC implementations, which scaled quadratically with the number of mesh cells in one dimension). Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms both explicit PIC and semi-Lagrangian Vlasov codes by more than an order of magnitude.
title An implicit, conservative electrostatic particle-in-cell algorithm for paraxial magnetic nozzles
topic Plasma Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07146