No Arabic abstract
New developments in the theory and numerical simulation of a recently proposed one-dimensional nonlinear time-dependent fluid model [K. Avinash, A. Bhattacharjee, and S. Hu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 075001 (2003)] for void formation in dusty plasmas are presented. The model describes an initial instability caused by the ion drag, rapid nonlinear growth, and a nonlinear saturation mechanism that realizes a quasi-steady state containing a void. The earlier one-dimensional model has been extended to two and three dimensions (the latter, assuming spherical symmetry), using a more complete set of dynamical equations than was used in the earlier one-dimensional formulation. The present set of equations includes an ion continuity equation and a nonlinear ion drag operator. Qualitative features of void formation are shown to be robust with respect to different functional forms of the ion drag operator.
A Landau fluid model for a collisionless electron-proton magnetized plasma, that accurately reproduces the dispersion relation and the Landau damping rate of all the magnetohydrodynamic waves, is presented. It is obtained by an accurate closure of the hydrodynamic hierarchy at the level of the fourth order moments, based on linear kinetic theory. It retains non-gyrotropic corrections to the pressure and heat flux tensors up to the second order in the ratio between the considered frequencies and the ion cyclotron frequency.
Continuum kinetic simulations of plasmas, where the distribution function of the species is directly discretized in phase-space, permits fully kinetic simulations without the statistical noise of particle-in-cell methods. Recent advances in numerical algorithms have made continuum kinetic simulations computationally competitive. This work presents the first continuum kinetic description of high-fidelity wall boundary conditions that utilize the readily available particle distribution function. The boundary condition is realized through a reflection function that can capture a wide range of cases from simple specular reflection to more involved first principles models. Examples with detailed discontinuous Galerkin implementation are provided for secondary electron emission using phenomenological and first-principles quantum-mechanical models. Results presented in this work demonstrate the effect of secondary electron emission on a classical plasma sheath.
In plasmas at very low temperatures formation of neutral atoms is dominated by collisional three-body recombination, owing to the strong ~ T^(-9/2) scaling of the corresponding recombination rate with the electron temperature T. While this law is well established at high temperatures, the unphysical divergence as T -> 0 clearly suggest a breakdown in the low-temperature regime. Here, we present a combined molecular dynamics-Monte-Carlo study of electron-ion recombination over a wide range of temperatures and densities. Our results reproduce the known behavior of the recombination rate at high temperatures, but reveal significant deviations with decreasing temperature. We discuss the fate of the kinetic bottleneck and resolve the divergence-problem as the plasma enters the ultracold, strongly coupled domain.
In this paper we present energy-conserving, mixed discontinuous Galerkin (DG) and continuous Galerkin (CG) schemes for the solution of a broad class of physical systems described by Hamiltonian evolution equations. These systems often arise in fluid mechanics (incompressible Euler equations) and plasma physics (Vlasov--Poisson equations and gyrokinetic equations), for example. The dynamics is described by a distribution function that evolves given a Hamiltonian and a corresponding Poisson bracket operator, with the Hamiltonian itself computed from field equations. Hamiltonian systems have several conserved quantities, including the quadratic invariants of total energy and the $L_2$ norm of the distribution function. For accurate simulations one must ensure that these quadratic invariants are conserved by the discrete scheme. We show that using a discontinuous Galerkin scheme to evolve the distribution function and ensuring that the Hamiltonian lies in its continuous subspace leads to an energy-conserving scheme in the continuous-time limit. Further, the $L_2$ norm is conserved if central fluxes are used to update the distribution function, but decays monotonically when using upwind fluxes. The conservation of density and $L_2$ norm is then used to show that the entropy is a non-decreasing function of time. The proofs shown here apply to any Hamiltonian system, including ones in which the Poisson bracket operator is non-canonical (for example, the gyrokinetic equations). We demonstrate the ability of the scheme to solve the Vlasov--Poisson and incompressible Euler equations in 2D and provide references where we have applied these schemes to solve the much more complex 5D electrostatic and electromagnetic gyrokinetic equations.
A model of global magnetic reconnection rate in relativistic collisionless plasmas is developed and validated by the fully kinetic simulation. Through considering the force balance at the upstream and downstream of the diffusion region, we show that the global rate is bounded by a value $sim 0.3$ even when the local rate goes up to $sim O(1)$ and the local inflow speed approaches the speed of light in strongly magnetized plasmas. The derived model is general and can be applied to magnetic reconnection under widely different circumstances.