Related papers: A coupled guiding center-Boris particle pusher for…
Low density plasmas are characterized by a large scale separation between the gyromotion of particles around local magnetic fields and the macroscopic scales of the system, often making global kinetic simulations computationally…
Next-generation high-power lasers that can be focused to intensities exceeding 10^23 W/cm^2 are enabling new physics and applications. The physics of how these lasers interact with matter is highly nonlinear, relativistic, and can involve…
This paper discusses how to improve the Boris pusher used to advance relativistic charged particles in fixed electromagnetic fields. We first derive a simpler solution to a flaw previously discovered by others. We then derive a new analytic…
We present a numerical implementation of the guiding center approximation to describe the relativistic motion of charged test particles in the PLUTO code for astrophysical plasma dynamics. The guiding center approximation (GCA) removes the…
Abridged. Kinetic plasma simulations are nowadays commonly used to study a wealth of non-linear behaviours and properties in laboratory and space plasmas. In particular, in high-energy physics and astrophysics, the plasma usually evolves in…
Perturbative guiding center theory adequately describes the slow drift motion of charged particles in the strongly-magnetized regime characteristic of thermal particle populations in various magnetic fusion devices. However, it breaks down…
Global particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of pulsar magnetospheres are performed with a volume, surface and pair production-based plasma injection schemes to systematically investigate the transition between electrosphere and force-free…
The hybrid method combining particle-in-cell and magnetohydrodynamics can be used to study the interaction between energetic particles and global plasma modes. In this paper we introduce the M3D-C1-K code, which is developed based on the…
A fundamental task in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of plasma physics is solving for charged particle motion in electromagnetic fields. This problem is especially challenging when the plasma is strongly magnetized due to numerical…
Relativistic strongly magnetized plasmas are produced in laboratories thanks to state-of-the-art laser technology but can naturally be found around compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes. Detailed studies of the behaviour of…
We present particle-in-cell simulations of one dimensional relativistic electromagnetic shocks in a uniform magnetic field, for a range of magnetic field strengths, plasma temperatures and numerical initial conditions. We show that the…
We develop protocols to confine charged particles using time-varying magnetic fields and demonstrate the possible non-torus configuration resulting from the distribution of single-particle motion orbits. A two-step strategy is proposed to…
We introduce a new electrostatic particle-in-cell algorithm capable of using large timesteps compared to particle gyro-period under a uniform external magnetic field. The algorithm extends earlier electrostatic fully implicit PIC…
Low density plasmas in curved spacetimes, such as those found in accretion flows around black holes, are challenging to model from first principles, owing to the large scale separation between the characteristic scales of the microscopic…
In this paper, we study the charged-particle dynamics under strong magnetic field in a toroidal axi-symmetric geometry. Using modulated Fourier expansions of the exact and numerical solutions, the long-term drift motion of the exact…
Astrophysical plasmas in relativistic spacetimes, such as black hole accretion flows, are often weakly collisional and require kinetic modeling to capture non-local transport and particle acceleration. However, the extreme scale separation…
We compare relativistic particle integrators commonly used in plasma physics showing several test cases relevant for astrophysics. Three explicit particle pushers are considered, namely the Boris, Vay, and Higuera-Cary schemes. We also…
A customized finite-difference field solver for the particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm that provides higher fidelity for wave-particle interactions in intense electromagnetic waves is presented. In many problems of interest, particles with…
Time-centered, hence second-order, methods for integrating the relativistic momentum of charged particles in an electromagnetic field are derived. A new method is found by averaging the momentum before use in the magnetic rotation term, and…
A novel electromagnetic particle-in-cell algorithm has been developed for fully kinetic plasma simulations on unstructured (irregular) meshes in complex body-of-revolution geometries. The algorithm, implemented in the BORPIC++ code,…