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Main Authors: DiIorio, Stephen, Fonseca, Ricardo, Tsung, Frank, Winjum, Benjamin J., Thomas, Alec G. R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17885
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author DiIorio, Stephen
Fonseca, Ricardo
Tsung, Frank
Winjum, Benjamin J.
Thomas, Alec G. R.
author_facet DiIorio, Stephen
Fonseca, Ricardo
Tsung, Frank
Winjum, Benjamin J.
Thomas, Alec G. R.
contents Ionization is critical in the formation and evolution of plasma dynamics; collisional ionization, in particular, is an often overlooked source of electrons when dealing with laser-plasma interactions. Ionization plays a crucial role in understanding the complex plasma kinetics, ranging from cold and sparse astrophysical settings to hot and dense fusion systems. In this paper, we describe the underlying theory for and development, validation, and verification of an extension to the standard particle-in-cell method to include a deterministic algorithm for collisional ionization physics. This algorithm offers improved accuracy, achieving up to two orders of magnitude decrease in the error of the ionization rate calculations, scales linearly in execution time with the number of macro-particles per cell, has been tested for physical correctness and benchmarked against several codes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17885
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Deterministic Ionization Algorithm for the OSIRIS Particle-in-Cell Framework
DiIorio, Stephen
Fonseca, Ricardo
Tsung, Frank
Winjum, Benjamin J.
Thomas, Alec G. R.
Plasma Physics
Ionization is critical in the formation and evolution of plasma dynamics; collisional ionization, in particular, is an often overlooked source of electrons when dealing with laser-plasma interactions. Ionization plays a crucial role in understanding the complex plasma kinetics, ranging from cold and sparse astrophysical settings to hot and dense fusion systems. In this paper, we describe the underlying theory for and development, validation, and verification of an extension to the standard particle-in-cell method to include a deterministic algorithm for collisional ionization physics. This algorithm offers improved accuracy, achieving up to two orders of magnitude decrease in the error of the ionization rate calculations, scales linearly in execution time with the number of macro-particles per cell, has been tested for physical correctness and benchmarked against several codes.
title A Deterministic Ionization Algorithm for the OSIRIS Particle-in-Cell Framework
topic Plasma Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17885