Benchmark for two-dimensional large scale coherent structures in partially magnetized ExB plasmas -- Community collaboration & lessons learned
Abstract
Low-temperature plasmas are essential to both fundamental scientific research and critical industrial applications. As in many areas of science, numerical simulations have become a vital tool for uncovering new physical phenomena and guiding technological development. Code benchmarking remains crucial for verifying implementations and evaluating performance. This work continues the Landmark benchmark initiative, a series specifically designed to support the verification of low-temperature plasma codes. In this study, seventeen simulation codes from a collaborative community of nineteen international institutions modeled a partially magnetized ExB Penning discharge. The emergence of large scale coherent structures, or rotating plasma spokes, endows this configuration with an enormous range of time scales, making it particularly challenging to simulate. The codes showed excellent agreement on the rotation frequency of the spoke as well as key plasma properties, including time-averaged ion density, plasma potential, and electron temperature profiles. Achieving this level of agreement came with challenges, and we share lessons learned on how to conduct future benchmarking campaigns. Comparing code implementations, computational hardware, and simulation runtimes also revealed interesting trends, which are summarized with the aim of guiding future plasma simulation software development.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.21261,
title = {Benchmark for two-dimensional large scale coherent structures in partially magnetized ExB plasmas -- Community collaboration & lessons learned},
author = {Andrew T. Powis and Eduardo Ahedo and Alejandro Álvarez Laguna and Nicolas Barléon and Enrique Bello-Benítez and Lucas Beving and Jean-Pierre Boeuf and Guillaume Bogopolsky and Anne Bourdon and Filippo Cichocki and Bénédicte Cuenot and Andrew Denig and Zoltán Donkó and Paul-Quentin Elias and Miguel P. Encinar and Denis Eremin and Pablo Fajardo and Farbod Faraji and Gwenael Fubiani and Laurent Garrigues and Kentaro Hara and Peter Hartmann and Matthew Hopkins and Igor D. Kaganovich and Aaron Knoll and Giovanni Lapenta and Thierry E. Magin and Alberto Marín-Cebrián and Mario Merino and Pierpaolo Minelli and Mina Papahn Zadeh and Pietro Parodi and Federico Petronio and Maryam Reza and Andrei I. Smolyakov and Dmytro Sydorenko and Francesco Taccogna and Miles M. Turner and Olivier Vermorel and Willca Villafana and Liang Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.21261},
year = {2025}
}