Title

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

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2016

Publication Title

Journal of Computational Physics

Abstract

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.

Volume

326

Issue

1

First Page

342

Last Page

372

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2016.08.006

ISSN

0021-9991

Rights

Elsevier

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