A Hybrid Nodal-Staggered Pseudo-Spectral Electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell Method with Finite-Order Centering
ORAL
Abstract
Electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) codes are widely used to perform computer simulations of a variety of physical systems, including fusion plasmas, astrophysical plasmas, plasma wakefield particle accelerators, and secondary photon sources driven by ultra-intense lasers. In a PIC code, Maxwell's equations are solved on a grid with a numerical method of choice. This talk focuses on pseudo-spectral analytical time-domain (PSATD) algorithms and presents a novel hybrid PSATD PIC scheme that combines the respective advantages of standard nodal and staggered methods. The novelty of the hybrid scheme consists in using finite-order centering of grid quantities between nodal and staggered grids, in order to combine the solution of Maxwell's equations on a staggered grid with the deposition of charges and currents and the gathering of electromagnetic forces on a nodal grid. The correctness and performance of the novel hybrid scheme are assessed by means of numerical tests that employ different classes of PSATD equations in a variety of physical scenarios. It is shown that the novel hybrid scheme offers significant numerical and computational advantages, compared to purely nodal or staggered methods, for all the test cases presented.
*This research was supported by the Exascale Computing Project (17-SC-20-SC), a collaborative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration. This research was supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) T-ERC program (Grant No. ANR-18-ERC2-0002). We also acknowledge the financial support of the Cross-Disciplinary Program on Numerical Simulation of CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 871072.
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Publication:Zoni, E., Lehe, R., Shapoval, O., Belkin, D., Zaïm, N., Fedeli, L., Vincenti, H. and Vay, J.L., 2021. A Hybrid Nodal-Staggered Pseudo-Spectral Electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell Method with Finite-Order Centering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.12919.
