English

A quasi-neutral electromagnetic hybrid model with drift-kinetic electrons and fully kinetic ions

Plasma Physics 2026-05-25 v1

Abstract

In this work, we propose a hybrid model that combines drift-kinetic electrons with fully kinetic ions under the quasi-neutrality assumption, discretized using a geometric particle-in-cell framework on dual-grids. The model advances the perturbed electromagnetic fields EE and BB directly, rather than the scalar and vector potentials. The parallel electric field EE_\parallel is obtained from Ohm's law. The perpendicular electric field EE_\perp is computed from Amp\`ere's law by extracting the EE_\perp-dependent component of the drift-kinetic electron current. The quasi-neutrality constraint eliminates high-frequency light waves and Langmuir waves from the system. Temporal discretization is performed using low-storage Runge--Kutta schemes. In this quasi-neutral hybrid model, the right-hand polarized wave branch exhibits a whistler-like dispersion relation, which imposes a stringent timestep constraint. To address this, we develop a novel implicit-explicit splitting scheme for Faraday's law that significantly relaxes the timestep stability restriction. The model is validated in slab geometry by reproducing cold plasma wave branches, ion Bernstein waves, compressional and shear Alfv\'en waves, and ion acoustic waves.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.23573,
  title  = {A quasi-neutral electromagnetic hybrid model with drift-kinetic electrons and fully kinetic ions},
  author = {Guo Meng and Nishant Narechania and Eric Sonnendrücker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23573},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

25 pages, 14 figures