No Arabic abstract
A simple form of the Boris solver in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation is proposed. It employs an exact solution of the Lorentz-force part, and it is equivalent to the Boris solver with a gyrophase correction. As a favorable property for stable schemes, this form preserves a volume in the phase space. Numerical tests of the Boris solvers are conducted by test-particle simulations and by PIC simulations. The proposed form provides better accuracy than the popular form, while it only requires few additional computation time.
We construct Boris-type schemes for integrating the motion of charged particles in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation. The new solvers virtually combine the 2-step Boris procedure arbitrary n times in the Lorentz-force part, and therefore we call them the multiple Boris solvers. Using Chebyshev polynomials, a one-step form of the new solvers is provided. The new solvers give n^2 times smaller errors, allow larger timesteps, and have a long-term stability. We present numerical tests of the new solvers, in comparison with other particle integrators.
When a charged particle moves through a plasma at a speed much higher than the thermal velocity of the plasma, it is subjected to the force of the electrostatic field induced in the plasma by itself and loses its energy. This process is well-known as the stopping power of a plasma. In this paper we show that the same process works in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations as well and the energy loss rate of fast particles due to this process is mainly determined by the number of plasma electrons contained in the electron skin depth volume. However, since there are generally very few particles in that volume in PIC simulations compared with real plasmas, the energy loss effect can be exaggerated significantly and can affect the results. Therefore, especially for the simulations that investigate the particle acceleration processes, the number of particles used in the simulations should be chosen large enough to avoid this artificial energy loss.
Particle-in-Cell (PIC) methods are widely used computational tools for fluid and kinetic plasma modeling. While both the fluid and kinetic PIC approaches have been successfully used to target either kinetic or fluid simulations, little was done to combine fluid and kinetic particles under the same PIC framework. This work addresses this issue by proposing a new PIC method, PolyPIC, that uses polymorphic computational particles. In this numerical scheme, particles can be either kinetic or fluid, and fluid particles can become kinetic when necessary, e.g. particles undergoing a strong acceleration. We design and implement the PolyPIC method, and test it against the Landau damping of Langmuir and ion acoustic waves, two stream instability and sheath formation. We unify the fluid and kinetic PIC methods under one common framework comprising both fluid and kinetic particles, providing a tool for adaptive fluid-kinetic coupling in plasma simulations.
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 relativistic energies interact with intense electromagnetic fields that have phase velocities near the speed of light. Numerical errors can arise due to (1) dispersion errors in the phase velocity of the wave, (2) the staggering in time between the electric and magnetic fields and between particle velocity and position and (3) errors in the time derivative in the momentum advance. Errors of the first two kinds are analyzed in detail. It is shown that by using field solvers with different $mathbf{k}$-space operators in Faradays and Amperes law, the dispersion errors and magnetic field time-staggering errors in the particle pusher can be simultaneously removed for electromagnetic waves moving primarily in a specific direction. The new algorithm was implemented into OSIRIS by using customized higher-order finite-difference operators. Schemes using the proposed solver in combination with different particle pushers are compared through PIC simulation. It is shown that the use of the new algorithm, together with an analytic particle pusher (assuming constant fields over a time step), can lead to accurate modeling of the motion of a single electron in an intense laser field with normalized vector potentials, $eA/mc^2$, exceeding $10^4$ for typical cell sizes and time steps.
A new Riemann solver is presented for the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations with the so-called Boris correction. The Boris correction is applied to reduce wave speeds, avoiding an extremely small timestep in MHD simulations. The proposed Riemann solver, Boris-HLLD, is based on the HLLD solver. As done by the original HLLD solver, (1) the Boris-HLLD solver has four intermediate states in the Riemann fan when left and right states are given, (2) it resolves the contact discontinuity, Alfven waves, and fast waves, and (3) it satisfies all the jump conditions across shock waves and discontinuities except for slow shock waves. The results of a shock tube problem indicate that the scheme with the Boris-HLLD solver captures contact discontinuities sharply and it exhibits shock waves without any overshoot when using the minmod limiter. The stability tests show that the scheme is stable when $|u| lesssim 0.5c$ for a low Alfven speed ($V_A lesssim c$), where $u$, $c$, and $V_A$ denote the gas velocity, speed of light, and Alfven speed, respectively. For a high Alfven speed ($V_A gtrsim c$), where the plasma beta is relatively low in many cases, the stable region is large, $|u| lesssim (0.6-1) c$. We discuss the effect of the Boris correction on physical quantities using several test problems. The Boris-HLLD scheme can be useful for problems with supersonic flows in which regions with a very low plasma beta appear in the computational domain.