PPPL-5131

Canonical Symplectic Particle-in-Cell Method for Long-Term
 Large-Scale Simulations of the Vlasov-Maxwell System

Authors:  Hong Qin, Jian Liu, Jianyuan Xiao, Ruili Zhang, Yang He,
 Yulei Wang, Joshua W. Burby, Leland Ellison, Yao Zhou

Abstract:  Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulation is the most important numerical tool in plasma physics and accelerator physics. However, its long-term accuracy has not been established. To overcome this difficulty, we developed a canonical symplectic PIC method for the Vlasov-Maxwell system by discretizing the Marsden-Weinstein bracket. A fast local algorithm to solve the symplectic implicit time advance is discovered without root researching or global matrix inversion, enabling applications of the proposed method to very large-scale plasma simulations with many, e.g., 109, degrees of freedom.
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Submitted to: Physical Review Letters
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Download PPPL-5131
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