No Arabic abstract
Energetic electrons are of interest in many types of plasmas, however previous modeling of their properties has been restricted to the use of linear Fokker-Planck collision operators or non-relativistic formulations. Here, we describe a fully non-linear kinetic-equation solver, capable of handling large electric-field strengths (compared to the Dreicer field) and relativistic temperatures. This tool allows modeling of the momentum-space dynamics of the electrons in cases where strong departures from Maxwellian distributions may arise. As an example, we consider electron runaway in magnetic-confinement fusion plasmas and describe a transition to electron slide-away at field strengths significantly lower than previously predicted.
The~numerical solutions to a non-linear Fractional Fokker--Planck (FFP) equation are studied estimating the generalized diffusion coefficients. The~aim is to model anomalous diffusion using an FFP description with fractional velocity derivatives and Langevin dynamics where L{e}vy fluctuations are introduced to model the effect of non-local transport due to fractional diffusion in velocity space. Distribution functions are found using numerical means for varying degrees of fractionality of the stable L{e}vy distribution as solutions to the FFP equation. The~statistical properties of the distribution functions are assessed by a generalized normalized expectation measure and entropy and modified transport coefficient. The~transport coefficient significantly increases with decreasing fractality which is corroborated by analysis of experimental data.
Plasma wake lens in which all short relativistic electron bunches of sequence are focused identically and uniformly is studied analytically and by numerical simulation. For two types of lenses necessary parameters of focused sequence of relativistic electron bunches are formulated. Verification of these parameters is performed by numerical simulation.
Magnetic Tunnel Junctions (MTJs) constitute the novel memory element in STT-MRAM, which is ramping to production at major foundries as an eFlash replacement. MTJ switching exhibits a stochastic behavior due to thermal fluctuations, which is modeled by s-LLGS and Fokker-Planck (FP) equations. This work implements and benchmarks Finite Volume Method (FVM) and analytical solvers for the FP equation. To deploy an MTJ model for circuit design, it must be calibrated against silicon data. To address this challenge, this work presents a regression scheme to fit MTJ parameters to a given set of measured current, switching time and error rate data points, yielding a silicon-calibrated model suitable for MRAM macro transient simulation.
We present a Vlasov-DArwin numerical code (ViDA) specifically designed to address plasma physics problems, where small-scale high accuracy is requested even during the non linear regime to guarantee a clean description of the plasma dynamics at fine spatial scales. The algorithm provides a low-noise description of proton and electron kinetic dynamics, by splitting in time the multi-advection Vlasov equation in phase space. Maxwell equations for the electric and magnetic fields are reorganized according to Darwin approximation to remove light waves. Several numerical tests show that ViDA successfully reproduces the propagation of linear and nonlinear waves and captures the physics of magnetic reconnection. We also discuss preliminary tests of the parallelization algorithm efficiency, performed at CINECA on the Marconi-KNL cluster. ViDA will allow to run Eulerian simulations of a non-relativistic fully-kinetic collisionless plasma and it is expected to provide relevant insights on important problems of plasma astrophysics such as, for instance, the development of the turbulent cascade at electron scales and the structure and dynamics of electron-scale magnetic reconnection, such as the electron diffusion region.
The algorithm for Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD), as modified by Espagnol and Warren, is used as a starting point for proving an H-theorem for the free energy and deriving hydrodynamic equations. Equilibrium and transport properties of the DPD fluid are explicitly calculated in terms of the system parameters for the continuous time version of the model.