Spices1 — A smart-particle code for kinetic plasma simulation

Abstract

Spices1 (Smart Particle In Cell ElectroStatic 1D) simulates 1D plasmas governed by the Vlasov equation. A linear Fokker—Planck operator can be used to represent collisions between plasma species and a given background. The electrostatic approximation is used and no magnetic field is present. Spices1 uses computational particles with internal degrees of freedom (smart particles) to represent better the evolution of the many physical particles allocated to one single computational particle, employing a modified version of the Blob method. The Blob approach leads to inexpensive low noise calculations and has the additional advantage to allow an accurate and deterministic treatment of collision operators. The present work describes the steps taken to implement the Blob method to create Spices1. All the instructions required to use Spices1 are given in details. Several test cases and paradigmatic applications are presented to illustrate the capabilities of Spices1 and to provide benchmarks for testing purposes.