Comparison of plasma plume expansion simulations using fully kinetic electron treatment and electron fluid models

Abstract

The expansion of a plasma plume resulting from laser ablation plays an important role in a large number of applications, e.g., material processing, medical laser applications or novel space propulsion concepts. Here, a high-order three-dimensional Particle-In-Cell code is used to simulate such a plasma plume expansion. A major challenge in this kind of simulation is the handling of the electrons due to their low inertia and resultant high acceleration. Therefore, two separate treatments of electron modeling are compared. Firstly, the electrons are simulated as a normal particle species in a kinetic manner, which strongly decreases the time step size and thereby increases the computational effort. Secondly, the electrons are simulated using an electron fluid model that reduces the computational cost but is less accurate [1]. Additionally, the results from the fully kinetic model are compared regarding chemical reactions, in this case ionization and ion recombination. The electron potential is solved using a high-order highly parallel Hybrid Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method [2]. This method also allows simulating computationally expensive three-dimensional setups.