Expansion of a finite-size photoplasma in an electrostatic field with M-type electrode configuration using a novel adaptive mesh 2D-PIC code

Abstract

A two-dimensional electrostatic particle-in-cell code is developed with an adaptive mesh feature to investigate the dynamics of photoplasma in M-type electrode configurations. This adaptive mesh is designed by using a one-dimensional pseudo mesh, where at the starting of each pseudo cell the quasineutrality and density of charged particles are checked, which decides the coarseness of the actual computational mesh. Through this developed particle-in-cell code, the ion extraction process from a finite-size photoplasma is simulated for parallel plate and M-type electrode configurations. Subsequently, the ion extraction time from the photoplasma is investigated by using the different potential waveforms, i.e. constant and two-step potential. On the basis of this numerical hypothesis, it is observed that the efficacy of M-type configuration is better than the parallel plate electrode configuration. Moreover, ion collection efficiency is also improved using a two-step potential waveform.