Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Multiple-scale kinetic simulations with the ene...

Associated organisational unit

View graph of relations

Multiple-scale kinetic simulations with the energy conserving semi-implicit particle in cell method

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
Close
Article number705830205
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/06/2017
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of Plasma Physics
Issue number2
Volume83
Number of pages18
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date19/04/17
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The recently developed energy conserving semi-implicit method (ECsim) for particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation is applied to multiple-scale problems where the electron-scale physics needs to be only partially retained and the interest is on the macroscopic or ion-scale processes. Unlike hybrid methods, the ECsim is capable of providing kinetic electron information, such as wave–electron interaction (Landau damping or cyclotron resonance) and non-Maxwellian electron velocity distributions. However, like hybrid methods, the ECsim does not need to resolve all electron scales, allowing time steps and grid spacings orders of magnitude larger than in explicit PIC schemes. The additional advantage of the ECsim is that the stability at large scale is obtained while conserving energy exactly. Three examples are presented: ion acoustic waves, electron acoustic instability and reconnection processes.