Speeding-up direct implicit particle-in-cell simulations in bounded plasma by obtaining future electric field through explicitly propulsion of particles

Abstract

The direct implicit particle-in-cell is a powerful kinetic method for researching plasma characteristics. However, it is time-consuming to obtain the future electromagnetic field in such a method since the field equations contain time-dependent matrix coefficients. In this work, we propose to explicitly push particles and obtain the future electromagnetic field based on the information about the particles in the future. The new method retains the form of implicit particle pusher, but the future field is obtained by solving the traditional explicit equation. Several numerical experiments, including the motion of charged particle in electromagnetic field, plasma sheath, and free diffusion of plasma into vacuum, are implemented to evaluate the performance of the method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can suppress finite-grid-instability resulting from the coarse spatial resolution in electron Debye length through the strong damping of high-frequency plasma oscillation, while accurately describe low-frequency plasma phenomena, with the price of losing the numerical stability at large time-step. We believe that this work is helpful for people to research the bounded plasma by using particle-in-cell simulations.