Iterative Addition of Kinetic Effects to Cold Plasma RF Wave Solvers

The hot nature of fusion plasmas requires a wave vector dependent conductivity tensor for accurate calculation of wave heating and current drive. Traditional methods for calculating the linear, kinetic full-wave plasma response rely on a spectral method such that the wave vector dependent conductivity fits naturally within the numerical method. These methods have seen much success for application to the well-confined core plasma of tokamaks. However, quantitative prediction of high power RF antenna designs for fusion applications has meant a requirement of resolving the geometric details of the antenna and other plasma facing surfaces for which the Fourier spectral method is ill-suited. An approach to enabling the addition of kinetic effects to the more versatile finite-difference and finite-element cold-plasma full-wave solvers was presented by [1] where an operator-split iterative method was outlined. Here we expand on this approach, examine convergence and present a simplified kinetic current estimator for rapidly updating the right-hand side of the wave equation with kinetic corrections. [1] D. L. Green, L. A., Comp. Phys. Comm. 185(3), 736-743 (2014)