A particle-in-cell method for the simulation of plasmas based on an unconditionally stable field solver

• Published in: Journal of computational physics Vol. 326; no. C; pp. 342 - 372
• Main Authors: Wolf, Eric M., Causley, Matthew, Christlieb, Andrew, Bettencourt, Matthew
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.12.2016; Elsevier
• Subjects: 70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY; CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS; Computational plasma physics; Particle-in-cell; Unconditionally stable field solver; Particle-in-cell; Computational plasma physics; Unconditionally stable field solver
• ISSN: 0021-9991; 1090-2716; 1090-2716
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jcp.2016.08.006

We propose a new particle-in-cell (PIC) method for the simulation of plasmas based on a recently developed, unconditionally stable solver for the wave equation. This method is not subject to a CFL restriction, limiting the ratio of the time step size to the spatial step size, typical of explicit methods, while maintaining computational cost and code complexity comparable to such explicit schemes. We describe the implementation in one and two dimensions for both electrostatic and electromagnetic cases, and present the results of several standard test problems, showing good agreement with theory with time step sizes much larger than allowed by typical CFL restrictions.