Electromagnetic direct implicit plasma simulation (Q1098744)

A version of the direct implicit particle-in-cell algorithm is developed to treat 2D electromagnetic plasma simulation: a collection of charged particles are immersed in and evolving with an electromagnetic field. This new code is the AVANTI. It runs stably with arbitrary large time steps and is quite robust to large fluctuations that result when the plasma has few particles per cell. Among new features of the multidimensional electromagnetic implementation are: 1) the need for a sufficiently robust method of determining the implicit susceptibility in order to avoid a nonlinear instability found in the limit of few particles per cell and large time step, and 2) the solution of the strongly coupled elliptic equations for the components of the electric field. Care must be taken to maintain Gauss' Law, this can be managed with a more complex form of a correction factor, the implicit susceptibility. The code was tested on the investigation of particle beam filamentation and magnetic reconnection.