Iterative addition of parallel temperature effects to finite-difference simulation of radio-frequency wave propagation in plasmas

Abstract

Accurate simulations of how radio frequency (RF) power is launched, propagates, and absorbed in a magnetically confined plasma is a computationally challenging problem that for which no comprehensive approach presently exists. The underlying physics is governed by the Vlasov–Maxwell equations, and characteristic length scales can vary by three orders of magnitude. Present algorithms are, in general, based on finding the constituative relation between the induced RF current and the RF electric field and solving the resulting set of Maxwell’s equations. These linear equations use a Fourier basis set that is not amenable to multi-scale formulations and have a large dense coefficient matrix that requires a high-communications overhead factorization technique. Here the use of operator splitting to separate the current and field calculations, and a low-overhead iterative solver leads to an algorithm that avoids these issues and has the potential to solve presently intractable problems due to its data-parallel and favorable scaling characteristics. We verify the algorithm for the iterative addition of parallel temperature effects for a 1D electron Langmuir by reproducing the solution obtained with the existing Fourier kinetic RF code aorsa (Jaeger et al., 2008).