Event-driven, hybrid particle-in-cell simulation: a new paradigm for multi-scale plasma modeling (Q2495767)

After a brief review of standard computational tools used for studies of space and laboratory plasma the paper concentrates to the extension and generalization of the works done in the field of synchronous electrostatic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation and flux-conservative pontial differential equations, with the introduction of a general discrete-event simulation (DES) paradigm for the time dependent PIC method of the description of hybrid plasma problems. The most important results are the following. The new hybrid DES code is validated in a number of realistic problems describing weak magnetosonic discontinuities. The application of this code to simulate the physics of high Mach number kinetic turbulence turned out to be more robust, more accurate and faster than the time stepping counterparts of the computational model.