Dynamic coupling between particle-in-cell and atomistic simulations
arXiv:1906.08125 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.101.053307
Abstract
We propose a method to directly couple molecular dynamics, finite element method and particle-in-cell techniques to simulate metal surface response to high electric fields. We use this method to simulate the evolution of a field emitting tip under thermal runaway by fully including the 3D space-charge effects. We also present a comparison of the runaway process between the two tip geometries of different widths. The results show with high statistical significance that in case of sufficiently narrow field emitters, the thermal runaway occurs in cycles where intensive neutral evaporation alternates with the cooling periods. The comparison with previous works shows, that the evaporation rate in the regime of intensive evaporation is sufficient to ignite a plasma arc above the simulated field emitters.
arXiv comment15 pages, 12 figures
References in corpus (7)
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Cited by in corpus (6)
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- General scaling laws of space charge effects in field emission
- Simulating vacuum arc initiation by coupling emission, heating and plasma processes
- General form of the tunnelling barrier for nanometrically sharp electron emitters
- Effect of dc voltage pulsing on high-vacuum electrical breakdowns near Cu surfaces
- Two dimensional modelling of the interaction between electromagnetic waves and plasma-metamaterial composite structures using the particle-in-cell method