A cancellation problem in hybrid particle-in-cell schemes due to finite particle size

Abstract

The quasi-neutral hybrid particle-in-cell algorithm with kinetic ions and fluid electrons is a popular model to study multi-scale problems in laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. Here, it is shown that the treatment of ions as finite-size particles and electrons as a grid-based fluid can cause significant numerical wave dispersion errors in the magnetohydrodynamic limit ($k{d}_i\ll 1$, where $d_i$ is the ion skin-depth). Practical requirements on the mesh spacing $\Delta x/d_i$ are suggested to bound these errors from above.

References in corpus (5)

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Hybrid-VPIC: an Open-Source Kinetic/Fluid Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Code
• Astrophysical explosions revisited: collisionless coupling of debris to magnetized plasma
• Hybrid Paricle-in-Cell Simulations of Electromagnetic Coupling and Waves From Streaming Burst Debris
• The muphyII Code: Multiphysics Plasma Simulation on Large HPC Systems
• A conservative implicit-PIC scheme for the hybrid kinetic-ion fluid-electron plasma model on curvilinear meshes