English

Hyper Boris integrators for kinetic plasma simulations

Computational Physics 2025-06-06 v2 Plasma Physics Space Physics

Abstract

We propose a family of numerical solvers for the nonrelativistic Newton--Lorentz equation in kinetic plasma simulations. The new solvers extend the standard 4-step Boris procedure, which has second-order accuracy in time, in three ways. First, we repeat the 4-step procedure multiple times, using an nn-times smaller timestep (Δt/n\Delta t/n). We derive a formula for the arbitrary subcycling number nn, so that we obtain the result without repeating the same calculations. Second, prior to the 4-step procedure, we apply Boris-type gyrophase corrections to the electromagnetic field. In addition to a well-known correction to the magnetic field, we correct the electric field in an anisotropic manner to achieve higher-order (N=2,4,6N=2,4,6 \dotsth order) accuracy. Third, combining these two methods, we propose a family of high-accuracy particle solvers, the hyper Boris solvers, which have two hyperparameters of the subcycling number nn and the order of accuracy, NN. The nn-cycle NNth-order solver gives a numerical error of (Δt/n)N\sim (\Delta t/n)^{N} at affordable computational cost.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.02270,
  title  = {Hyper Boris integrators for kinetic plasma simulations},
  author = {Seiji Zenitani and Tsunehiko N. Kato},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.02270},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

To appear in Comput. Phys. Commun.; 27 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:20:52.711Z