Monte Carlo simulation method for incoherent Thomson scattering spectra from arbitrary electron distribution functions

Abstract

We developed a Monte Carlo simulation method to calculate incoherent Thomson scattering spectra in high temperature plasmas. The basic idea is to treat the entire scattering process as the superposition of individual photon-electron interactions. We introduce macro-particles, referred from particle-in-cell simulations, to reduce the computational cost, and obtain scattered spectra within a reasonable computational time. Since the velocity of the interacting electron is randomly sampled from an electron distribution function, the method can be applied to arbitrary electron distribution functions provided an appropriate sampling scheme is available. We present simulation results for relativistic Maxwellian and kappa distribution functions, and compare them with both analytical and numerical spectra for validation. The simulated spectra show good agreement with both analytical and numerical results, demonstrating that the Monte Carlo simulation method can reliably reproduce incoherent Thomson scattering spectra.

14 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Kappa distributions: theory and applications in space plasmas
• Loading Relativistic Maxwell Distributions in Particle Simulations
• The Generation of Random Variates From a Relativistic Maxwellian Distribution
• Collective Thomson scattering in non-equilibrium laser produced two-stream plasmas
• Loading a relativistic kappa distribution in particle simulations
• Ion-acoustic feature of collective Thomson scattering in non-equilibrium two-stream plasmas
• Electron density structure measurements with scattered intense laser beam