A conservative implicit-PIC scheme for the hybrid kinetic-ion fluid-electron plasma model on curvilinear meshes

Abstract

The hybrid kinetic-ion fluid-electron plasma model is widely used to study challenging multi-scale problems in space and laboratory plasma physics. Here, a novel conservative scheme for this model employing implicit particle-in-cell techniques is extended to arbitrary coordinate systems via curvilinear maps from logical to physical space. The scheme features a fully non-linear electromagnetic formulation with a multi-rate time advance - including sub-cycling and orbit-averaging for the kinetic ions. By careful choice of compatible particle-based kinetic-ion and mesh-based fluid-electron discretizations in curvilinear coordinates, as well as particle-mesh interpolations and implicit midpoint time advance, the scheme is proven to conserve total energy for arbitrary curvilinear meshes. In the electrostatic limit, the method is also proven to conserve total momentum for arbitrary curvilinear meshes. Although momentum is not conserved for arbitrary curvilinear meshes in the electromagnetic case, it is for an important subset of Cartesian tensor-packed meshes. The scheme and its novel conservation properties are demonstrated for several challenging numerical problems using different curvilinear meshes, including a merging flux-rope simulation for a space weather application, and a helical $m=1$ mode simulation for magnetic fusion energy application.

References in corpus (20)

• Magnetic self-organisation in Hall-dominated magnetorotational turbulence
• High-resolution hybrid simulations of kinetic plasma turbulence at proton scales
• A multi-dimensional, energy- and charge-conserving, nonlinearly implicit, electromagnetic Vlasov-Darwin particle-in-cell algorithm
• Pegasus: A New Hybrid-Kinetic Particle-in-Cell Code for Astrophysical Plasma Dynamics
• Subproton-scale cascades in solar wind turbulence: driven hybrid-kinetic simulations
• A computational model for exploring particle acceleration during reconnection in macro-scale systems
• The island coalescence problem: scaling of reconnection in extended fluid models including higher-order moments
• Bursty magnetic reconnection at the Earth's magnetopause triggered by high-speed jets
• A fully implicit, conservative, non-linear, electromagnetic hybrid particle-ion/fluid-electron algorithm
• Hybrid simulation of a parallel collisionless shock in the Large Plasma Device
• The role of guide field in magnetic reconnection driven by island coalescence
• Temperature gradient driven heat flux closure in fluid simulations of collisionless reconnection
• Three-Dimensional Stability of Current Sheets Supported by Electron Pressure Anisotropy
• A Robust Method for Handling Low Density Regions in Hybrid Simulations for Collisionless Plasmas
• Global gyrokinetic particle-in-cell simulations of internal kink instabilities
• Astrophysical explosions revisited: collisionless coupling of debris to magnetized plasma
• A Generalized Quasi-Neutral Fluid-Particle Hybrid Plasma Model and Its Application to Energetic-Particle-Magnetohydrodynamics Hybrid Simulation
• An unsupervised machine-learning checkpoint-restart algorithm using Gaussian mixtures for particle-in-cell simulations
• A cancellation problem in hybrid particle-in-cell schemes due to finite particle size
• Wavelet Methods for Studying the Onset of Strong Plasma Turbulence