Related papers: Suppressing grid instability and noise in particle…
When the Debye length is not resolved in a simulation using the most common particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm, the plasma will unphysically heat until the Debye length becomes resolved via a phenomenon known as grid heating. This article…
Noise is a major concern for Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations. We propose a new theoretical and algorithmic framework to evaluate and reduce the noise level for PIC simulations based on the Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) theory, which…
Finite-grid (or aliasing) instabilities are pervasive in particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulation algorithms, and force the modeler to resolve the smallest (Debye) length scale in the problem regardless of dynamical relevance. These…
The effects of noise in particle-in-cell (PIC) and Vlasov simulations of the Buneman instability in unmagnetized plasmas are studied. It is found that, in the regime of low drift velocity, the linear stage of the instability in PIC…
We propose a sparse grids based adaptive noise reduction strategy for electrostatic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. Our approach is based on the key idea of relying on sparse grids instead of a regular grid in order to increase the…
Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are essential for studying kinetic plasma processes, but they often suffer from statistical noise, especially in plasmas with fast flows. We have also found that the typical central difference scheme used…
The Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method is widely used in relativistic particle beam and laser plasma modeling. However, the PIC method exhibits numerical instabilities that can render unphysical simulation results or even destroy the simulation.…
Particle-in-cell (PIC) is the most used algorithm to perform self-consistent tracking of intense charged particle beams. It is based on depositing macro-particles on a grid, and subsequently solving on it the Poisson equation. It is well…
The simulation of plasma physics is computationally expensive because the underlying physical system is of high dimensions, requiring three spatial dimensions and three velocity dimensions. One popular numerical approach is Particle-In-Cell…
The filamentation instability driven by two spatially uniform and counter-streaming beams of charged particles in plasmas is modelled by a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. Each beam consists of the electrons and positrons. The four…
Numerical heating in particle-in-cell (PIC) codes currently precludes the accurate simulation of cold, relativistic plasma over long periods, severely limiting their applications in astrophysical environments. We present a spatially…
We use particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations and simple analytic models to investigate the laser-plasma interaction known as ponderomotive steepening. When normally incident laser light reflects at the critical surface of a plasma, the…
We study with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations the stability of fast magnetosonic shocks. They expand across a collisionless plasma and an orthogonal magnetic field that is aligned with one of the directions resolved by the 2D…
Based on the particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulation method, the speed-limited PIC (SLPIC) method delivers faster kinetic plasma simulation in cases where the particle distributions evolve slowly compared with the maximum stable PIC…
The traditional explicit electrostatic momentum-conserving Particle-in-cell algorithm requires strict resolution of the electron Debye length to deliver numerical accuracy. The explicit electrostatic energy-conserving Particle-in-Cell…
We use particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of a collisionless, electron-ion plasma with a decreasing background magnetic field, $B$, to study the effect of velocity-space instabilities on the viscous heating and thermal conduction of the…
The electrostatic stability of electron-positron plasmas is investigated in the point-dipole and Z-pinch limits of dipole geometry. The kinetic dispersion relation for sub-bounce-frequency instabilities is derived and solved. For the…
A field theory and the associated structure-preserving geometric Particle-In-Cell (PIC) algorithm are developed to study low frequency electrostatic perturbations with fully kinetic ions and adiabatic electrons in magnetized plasmas. The…
The particle-in-cell (PIC) method has been widely used for plasma simulation, because of its noise-reduction capability and moderate computational cost. The immersed finite element (IFE) method is efficient for solving interface problems on…
The advent of high-power Hall thrusters and the increasing interest towards their use as a primary propulsion system for various missions have given a new boost to the efforts aiming at self-consistent predictive modeling of this thruster…