Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Particle-in-cell method for parallel dynamics in magnetized electron plasmas: Study of high-amplitude BGK modes

2006; Elsevier BV; Volume: 218; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jcp.2006.01.040

1090-2716

F. Peinetti, F. Peano, G. Coppa, J. S. Wurtele,

Atomic and Molecular Physics

The present paper describes the numerical technique that has been developed, in the framework of the particle-in-cell (PIC) method, to study the dynamics of a nonneutral plasma along the magnetic field lines. In particular, the technique has been employed to simulate the formation and long-term evolution of large-amplitude electrostatic waves experimentally observed in electron plasmas confined in a Penning trap [W. Bertsche, J. Fajans, L. Friedland, Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 (2003) 265003]. Due to the peculiar features of the physical system, namely the existence of different time scales and the presence of a perturbative oscillating potential, ad hoc numerical techniques have been developed. In particular, with a suitable radial decomposition all important two-dimensional phenomena are fully taken into account while keeping the computational effort to that of a standard one-dimensional PIC codes. Moreover, a novel particle loading technique (ergodic loading) has been developed, which ensures a significant reduction of numerical noise. The results obtained with the present technique are in excellent agreement with the experiments [F. Peinetti, W. Bertsche, J. Fajans, J. Wurtele, L. Friedland, Phys. Plasmas 12 (2005) 062112]. Moreover, results presented here furnish clear evidences of the close relationship between the observed nonlinear structures and the Bernstein–Greene–Kruskal modes.