Abstract
The interaction of a small object with surrounding plasma is an area of plasma-physics research with a multitude of applications. This paper introduces the plasma octree code pot, a microscopic simulator of a spheroidal dust grain in a plasma. pot uses the Barnes–Hut treecode algorithm to perform N-body simulations of electrons and ions in the vicinity of a chargeable spheroid, employing also the Boris particle-motion integrator and Hutchinson’s reinjection algorithm from SCEPTIC; a description of the implementation of all three algorithms is provided. We present results from pot simulations of the charging of spheres in magnetised plasmas, and of spheroids in unmagnetized plasmas. The results call into question the validity of using the Boltzmann relation in hybrid PIC codes.
Highlights
The study of dusty plasmas is concerned with objects, usually on the micro- or nanoscale, immersed in a hot ionized gas known as a plasma
The co-dependence of these processes, and many others, in a dusty plasma has led to their alternative name of “complex plasmas”, and is manifest in surprising phenomena such as the self-organization of dust grains into crystal-like structures [6]
This paper describes the development of the fully microscopic plasma octree code pot, which implements the Barnes-Hut algorithm for a plasma in the vicinity of a dust grain
Summary
The study of dusty plasmas is concerned with objects, usually on the micro- or nanoscale, immersed in a hot ionized gas known as a plasma. Collisions between particles must be artificially imposed on the simulation to be included at all, despite the fact that they can be crucial to many aspects of the dust-plasma interaction [11] Hybrid codes such as SCEPTIC employ the Boltzmann relation for electrons, which may be invalid when a magnetic field is present [21], and which dispenses completely with microscopic information about the electrons. A sceptic might suppose that the analytic theories and PIC codes agree only because they share systematic biases arising from the details they both omitted To preempt this criticism one could calculate the motion of every single particle in the plasma in order to maximize the faithfulness of a simulation.
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