Related papers: Suppressing grid instability and noise in particle…
Quasistatic particle-in-cell (PIC) codes are increasingly employed to study laser or plasma wakefield accelerators. By decoupling the slow dynamics of the driver (a laser or ultrarelativistic particle beam) from the fast plasma response,…
Particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulations are a productive and valued tool for the study of nonlinear plasma phenomena, yet there are basic questions about the simulation methods themselves that remain unanswered. Here we study one such…
We report on 3D-3V particle-in-cell simulations of fast-ion energy-loss rates in cold, weakly-magnetized, weakly-coupled plasma where the electron gyroradius, $\rho_{e}$, is comparable to or less than the Debye length, $\lambda_{De}$, and…
The use of explicit particle-in-cell (PIC) method for relativistic plasma simulations is restricted by numerical heating and instabilities that may significantly constrain the choice of time and space steps. To partially eliminate these…
Plasma impedance probes (PIPs) are a type of RF probe that primarily measure electron density. This work introduces two advancements: a streamlined analytical model for interpreting PIP-monopole measurements and techniques for achieving…
We report a new particle in cell (PIC) method based on the semi-implicit approach. The novelty of the new method is that unlike any of its semi-implicit predecessors at the same time retains the explicit computational cycle and conserves…
We analyze the noise in macro-particle methods used in plasma physics and fluid dynamics, leading to approaches for minimizing the total error, focusing on electrostatic models in one dimension. We describe kernel density estimation for…
The numerical instability observed in the Electromagnetic-Particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) simulations with a plasma drifting with relativistic velocities is studied using both theory and computer simulations. We derive the numerical dispersion…
The $\delta f$ particle-in-cell algorithm has been a useful tool in studying the physics of plasmas, particularly turbulent magnetized plasmas in the context of gyrokinetics. The reduction in noise due to not having to resolve the full…
First-principles particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation is a powerful tool for understanding plasma behavior, but this power often comes at great computational expense. Artificially reducing the ion/electron mass ratio is a time-honored practice…
We propose the use of sparse grids to accelerate particle-in-cell (PIC) schemes. By using the so-called `combination technique' from the sparse grids literature, we are able to dramatically increase the size of the spatial cells in…
Previous theoretical considerations of electron beam relaxation in inhomogeneous plasmas have indicated that the effects of the irregular solar wind may account for the poor agreement of homogeneous modelling with the observations.…
We present a geometric Particle-in-Cell (PIC) algorithm on two-dimensional (2D) unstructured meshes for studying electrostatic perturbations in magnetized plasmas. In this method, ions are treated as fully kinetic particles, and electrons…
The paper presents a 1D2V electrostatic PIC model with a drift-kinetic description of all particle types aiming at simulating classical longitudinal plasma transport in axially symmetric open traps. The model generalizes the semi-implicit…
We introduce a deterministic discrete-particle simulation approach, the Linearly-Transformed Particle-In-Cell (LTPIC) method, that employs linear deformations of the particles to reduce the noise traditionally associated with particle…
We show that the hosing instability can be suppressed after the saturation of the self-modulation instability of a long particle bunch if the plasma density perturbation is linear. We derive scalings for maximum bunch tilts and seeds for…
The growth and saturation of Buneman-type instabilities is examined with a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation for parameters that are representative for the foreshock region of fast supernova remnant (SNR) shocks. A dense ion beam and the…
The pseudo-spectral analytical time-domain (PSATD) particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm solves the vacuum Maxwell's equations exactly, has no Courant time-step limit (as conventionally defined), and offers substantial flexibility in plasma and…
We present a study of the standard plasma physics test, Landau damping, using the Particle-In-Cell (PIC) algorithm. The Landau damping phenomenon consists of the damping of small oscillations in plasmas without collisions. In the PIC…
Particle acceleration in collisionless plasma systems is a central question in astroplasma and astroparticle physics. The structure of the acceleration regions, electron-ion energy equilibration, preacceleration of particles at shocks to…