Particle-in-cell Code Research Articles

Coupling of Fluid and Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Ambipolar Plasma Thrusters

Ambipolar plasma thrusters are an appealing technology due to multiple system-related advantages, including propellant flexibility and the absence of electrodes or neutralizer. Understanding the plasma generation and acceleration mechanisms is key to improving the performance and capabilities of these thrusters. However, the source and plume regions inside are often simulated separately, and no self-consistent strategy exists which can couple these different simulations together. This paper introduces the MUlti-regime Plasma Equilibrium Transport Solver (MUPETS), a self-consistent coupled model integrating a fluid solver for the plasma dynamics in the source, which are collision-driven, with a kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code for the plasma dynamics in the magnetic nozzle, which involve expansion across a diverging magnetic field. The methodology begins by solving the plasma source with the classical Bohm condition at the thruster’s throat. The resulting plasma profiles (density, temperature, speed) are input into the PIC code for the magnetic nozzle. The PIC code calculates the plasma plume expansion and determines the electric field at the thruster’s throat. This electric field is then used as a boundary condition in the fluid code, where it replaces the Bohm assumption, and the fluid simulation is repeated. This iterative process continues until convergence. In comparing the MUPETS results with those for an experimental thruster, the plasma densities at the thruster’s throat differed by less than 2–5% between the fluid and PIC regions. The thrust predictions agreed with the experimental trend, and were kept well within the measurement’s uncertainty band. These results validate the effectiveness of the coupling strategy for enhancing plasma thruster simulation accuracy.

Particle-in-cell simulations of pulsar magnetospheres: Transition between electrosphere and force-free regimes

Aims. Global particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of pulsar magnetospheres are performed with volume-, surface-, and pair-production-based plasma injection schemes to systematically investigate the transition between electrosphere and force-free pulsar magnetospheric regimes. Methods. We present a new extension of the PIC code OSIRIS that can be used to model pulsar magnetospheres with a two-dimensional axisymmetric spherical grid. The subalgorithms of the code and thorough benchmarks are presented in detail, including a new first-order current deposition scheme that conserves charge to machine precision. Results. We show that all plasma injection schemes produce a range of magnetospheric regimes. Active solutions can be obtained with surface and volume injection schemes when using artificially large plasma-injection rates, and with pair-production-based plasma injection for sufficiently large separation between kinematic and pair-production energy scales.

AHKASH: a new Hybrid particle-in-cell code for simulations of astrophysical collisionless plasma.

We introduce Astrophysical Hybrid-Kinetic simulations with the flash code ([Formula: see text]) - a new Hybrid particle-in-cell (PIC) code developed within the framework of the multiphysics code flash. The new code uses a second-order accurate Boris integrator and a predictor-predictor-corrector algorithm for advancing the Hybrid-kinetic equations, using the constraint transport method to ensure that magnetic fields are divergence-free. The code supports various interpolation schemes between the particles and grid cells, with post-interpolation smoothing to reduce finite particle noise. We further implement a [Formula: see text] method to study instabilities in weakly collisional plasmas. The new code is tested on standard physical problems such as the motion of charged particles in uniform and spatially varying magnetic fields, the propagation of Alfvén and whistler waves, and Landau damping of ion acoustic waves. We test different interpolation kernels and demonstrate the necessity of performing post-interpolation smoothing. We couple the turbgen turbulence driving module to the new Hybrid PIC code, allowing us to test the code on the highly complex physical problem of the turbulent dynamo. To investigate steady-state turbulence with a fixed sonic Mach number, it is important to maintain isothermal plasma conditions. Therefore, we introduce a novel cooling method for Hybrid PIC codes and provide tests and calibrations of this method to keep the plasma isothermal. We describe and test the 'hybrid precision' method, which significantly reduces (by a factor [Formula: see text]) the computational cost, without compromising the accuracy of the numerical solutions. Finally, we test the parallel scalability of the new code, showing excellent scaling up to 10,000 cores.

An integral approach to plasma-wall interaction modelling for EU-DEMO

Abstract The integral approach to plasma-wall interaction (PWI) modelling for DEMO is presented, which is a part of EUROfusion Theory and Advanced Simulation Coordination (E-TASC) activities that were established to advance the understanding and predictive capabilities for modelling of existing and future fusion devices using a modern advanced computing approach. In view of DEMO design, the aim of PWI modelling activities is to assess safety-relevant information regarding erosion of plasma-facing components (PFC), including its impact on plasma contamination, dust production, fuel inventory, and material response to transient events. This is achieved using a set of powerful and validated computer codes that deal with particular PWI aspects and interact with each other by means of relevant data exchange. Steady state erosion of tungsten PFC and subsequent transport and re-deposition of eroded material are simulated with the ERO2.0 code using a DEMO plasma background produced by dedicated SOLPS-ITER simulations. Dust transport simulations in steady state plasma also rely on the respective SOLPS-ITER solution and are performed with the MIGRAINe code. On the way to improved simulations of tungsten erosion in the divertor of DEMO, relevant high density sheath models are being developed based on Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations with the state-of-the-art BIT code family. PIC codes of the SPICE code family, in turn, provide relevant information on multi-emissive sheath physics, such as semi-empirical scaling laws for field-assisted thermionic emission. These scalings laws are essential for simulations of material melting under transient heat loads that are performed with the recently developed MEMENTO code, the successor of MEMOS-U. Fuel retention simulations assess tritium retention in tungsten and structural materials and permeation to coolant accounting for neutron damage, in particular for divertor monoblocks of different sizes, using the FESTIM code, and for the first wall, in particular in view of tritium self-sufficiency, using the TESSIM code. Respective code-code dependencies and interactions, as well as modelling results achieved to date are discussed in the contribution.

PM2D: A parallel GPU-based code for the kinetic simulation of laser plasma instabilities at large scales

Laser plasma instabilities (LPIs) have significant influences on the laser energy deposition efficiency and therefore are important processes in inertial confined fusion (ICF). Numerical simulations play important roles in revealing the complex physics of LPIs. Since LPIs are typically a three wave coupling process, the precise simulations of LPIs with kinetic effects require to resolve the laser period (around one femtosecond) and laser wavelength (less than one micron). In the typical ICF experiments, however, LPIs are involved in a spatial scale of several millimeters and a temporal scale of several nanoseconds. Therefore, the precise kinetic simulations of LPIs in such scales require huge computational resources and are hard to be carried out by present kinetic codes like particle-in-cell (PIC) codes. In this paper, a full wave fluid model of LPIs is constructed and numerically solved by the particle-mesh method, where the plasma is described by macro particles that can move across the mesh grids freely. Based upon this model, a two-dimensional (2D) GPU code named PM2D is developed. The PM2D code can simulate the kinetic effects of LPIs self-consistently as normal PIC codes. Moreover, as the physical model adopted in the PM2D code is specifically constructed for LPIs, the required macro particles per grid in the simulations can be largely reduced and thus overall simulation cost is considerably reduced comparing with PIC codes. More importantly, the numerical noise in the PM2D code is much lower, which makes it more robust than PIC codes in the simulation of LPIs for the long-time scale above 10 picoseconds. After the distributed computing is realized, our PM2D code is able to run on GPU clusters with a total mesh grids up to several billions, which meets the requirements for the simulations of LPIs at ICF experimental scale with reasonable cost. Program summaryProgram Title: PM2DCPC Library link to program files:https://doi.org/10.17632/xscj6vnkkw.1Licensing provisions: GNU General Public License v3.0.Programming language: C++, CUDA.Nature of problem: Although the large scale simulations of laser plasma instabilities (LPIs) is of great significance for the inertial confinement fusion (ICF), there is still no suitable code to simulate these problems. PM2D code based on a GPU platform provides an effective method to simulate these large scale problems in ICF.Solution method: A fluid model for LPIs is established firstly, which contains wave equations that describe the laser propagating process, electron and ion fluid equations that describe the plasma motions, and a Poisson's equation that describes the electrostatic field induced by charge separation. The wave equation is solved on a rectangular region using absorption boundary conditions on all of four boundaries. The absorption boundary condition on the left boundary is further extended to allow the incidence of driven lasers and absorption of scattering lasers simultaneously. The fluid equations in the physical model are solved by the particle-mesh method, in which the macro particles are driven to move by fluid forces. Since macro particles can move freely within the fixed fluid grids, the PM2D code can capture the kinetic effects self-consistently. The Poisson's equation for the electrostatic field is solved by a Fourier decomposition method in the y direction, which helps to decrease the simulation cost greatly. The PM2D code is developed on a GPU platform base on CUDA toolkit, which largely increase the computational speed.

Stabilization and correction of aberrated laser beams via plasma channelling.

High-power laser applications, and especially laser wakefield acceleration, continue to draw attention through various research topics, and may bring many industrial applications based on compact accelerators, from ultrafast imaging to cancer therapy. However, one main step towards this is the arch issue of stability. Indeed, the interaction of a complex, aberrated laser beam with plasma involves a lot of physical phenomena and non-linear effects, such as self-focusing and filamentation. Different outcomes can be induced by small laser instabilities (i.e. laser wavefront), therefore harming any practical solution. One promising path to be explored is the use of a plasma channel to possibly guide and correct aberrated beams. Complex and costly experimental facilities are required to investigate such topics. However, one way to quickly and efficiently explore new solutions is numerical simulations, especially Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations if, and only if, one is confidently implementing such aberrated beams which, contrary to a Gaussian beam, do not have analytical solutions. In this research, we propose two new advancements: the correct implementation of aberrated laser beams inside a 3D PIC code, showing a great consistency, under vacuum, compared to the calculations with Fresnel theory); and the correction of their quality via the propagation inside a plasma channel. We demonstrate improvements in the beam pattern, becoming closer to a single plasma mode with less distortions, and thus suggesting a better stability for the targeted application. Through this confident calculation technique for distorted laser beams, we are now expecting to proceed with more accurate PIC simulations, closer to experimental conditions, and obtained results with plasma channels indicate promising future research.

Implicit particle-in-cell development for ion source plasmas

Particle-in-Cell (PIC) codes used to study plasma dynamics within ion sources typically use an explicit scheme. These methods can be slow when simulating regions of high electron density in ion sources, which require resolving the Debye length in space and the plasma frequency in time. Recent developments on fully-implicit PIC models in curvilinear geometries have shown that these spatial/time scales can be significantly decreased/increased respectively, allowing for notable speed-ups in simulation time, and thus making it a potential tool for studying the physics of ion sources. For this purpose, a charge and energy conserving implicit PIC code has been developed in 1D to determine its potential for simulating bounded plasmas. In this paper, we use this model to simulate a 1D benchmark of a bounded plasma with fixed plasma density and electron/ion temperatures. The results are shown to compare well to the benchmark and to the results using an explicit PIC code. It is shown that the total amount of macro-particles used in the simulation is a better figure of merit for accurate results than the standard particles per cell used in literature. Significant speed-ups in computation time can be achieved for high plasma densities if the accuracy requirements are relaxed. In this case, we demonstrate the ability of the implicit PIC code to speed-up simulation time by nearly a factor of 12 compared to explicit PIC.

3D Self-Consistent Full Wave – PIC Models for Investigating Space-Resolved ECR Plasma Properties

Simulations are a powerful method to study the correlation between output beams and internal dynamics of electron cyclotron resonance ion sources (ECRIS), which involve a complex interplay between injected power, RF frequency, gas type and pressure. We present here some details on 3D full-wave Particle-in-Cell (PIC) code suites that can simulate electron and ion dynamics self-consistently in an ECR plasma. Preliminary runs of the simulation show an encouraging match with experimental data which acts as a benchmark for the PIC codes and highlights its potential for fundamental and applied interdisciplinary plasma research.

Coupling multi-fluid dynamics equipped with Landau closures to the particle-in-cell method

The particle-in-cell (PIC) method is successfully used to study magnetized plasmas. However, this requires large computational costs and limits simulations to short physical run times and often to set-ups of less than three spatial dimensions. Traditionally, this is circumvented either via hybrid-PIC methods (adopting massless electrons) or via magneto-hydrodynamic-PIC methods (modelling the background plasma as a single charge-neutral magneto-hydrodynamical fluid). Because both methods preclude modelling important plasma-kinetic effects, we introduce a new fluid-PIC code that couples a fully explicit and charge-conserving multi-fluid solver to the PIC code SHARP through a current-coupling scheme and solve the full set of Maxwell's equations. This avoids simplifications typically adopted for Ohm's law and enables us to fully resolve the electron temporal and spatial scales while retaining the versatility of initializing any number of ion, electron or neutral species with arbitrary velocity distributions. The fluid solver includes closures emulating Landau damping so that we can account for this important kinetic process in our fluid species. Our fluid-PIC code is second-order accurate in space and time. The code is successfully validated against several test problems, including the stability and accuracy of shocks and the dispersion relation and damping rates of waves in unmagnetized and magnetized plasmas. It also matches growth rates and saturation levels of the gyro-scale and intermediate-scale instabilities driven by drifting charged particles in magnetized thermal background plasmas in comparison with linear theory and PIC simulations. This new fluid-SHARP code is specially designed for studying high-energy cosmic rays interacting with thermal plasmas over macroscopic time scales.

Moment tracking and their coordinate transformations for macroparticles with an application to plasmas around black holes

Particle-in-cell (PIC) codes usually represent large groups of particles as a single macroparticle. These codes are computationally efficient but lose information about the internal structure of the macroparticle. To improve the accuracy of these codes, this work presents a method in which, as well as tracking the macroparticle, the moments of the macroparticle are also tracked. Although the equations needed to track these moments are known, the coordinate transformations for moments where the space and time coordinates are mixed cannot be calculated using the standard method for representing moments. These coordinate transformations are important in astrophysical plasma, where there is no preferred coordinate system. This work uses the language of Schwartz distributions to calculate the coordinate transformations of moments. Both the moment tracking and coordinate transformation equations are tested by modelling the motion of uncharged particles in a circular orbit around a black hole in both Schwarzschild and Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates. Numerical testing shows that the error in tracking moments is small, and scales quadratically. This error can be improved by including higher order moments. By choosing an appropriate method for using these moments to deposit the charge back onto the grid, a full PIC code can be developed.

First Simulations for the EuAPS Betatron Radiation Source: A Dedicated Radiation Calculation Code

X-ray production through betatron radiation emission from electron bunches is a valuable resource for several research fields. The EuAPS (EuPRAXIA Advanced Photon Sources) project, within the framework of EuPRAXIA, aims to provide 1–10 keV photons (X-rays), developing a compact plasma-based system designed to exploit self-injection processes that occur in the highly nonlinear laser-plasma interaction (LWFA) to drive electron betatron oscillations. Since the emitted radiation spectrum, intensity, angular divergence, and possible coherence strongly depend on the properties of the self-injected beam, accurate preliminary simulations of the process are necessary to evaluate the optimal diagnostic device specifications and to provide an initial estimate of the source’s performance. A dedicated tool for these tasks has been developed; electron trajectories from particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are currently undergoing numerical analysis through the calculation of retarded fields and spectra for various plasma and laser parameter combinations. The implemented forward approach evaluation of the fields could allow for the integration of the presented scheme into already existing PIC codes. The spectrum calculation is thus performed in detector time, giving a linear complex exponential phase; this feature allows for a semi-analitical Fourier transform evaluation. The code structure and some trajectories analysis results are presented.

Particle-in-cell simulations of high frequency capacitively coupled plasmas including spatially localised inductive-like heating

High frequency (HF) capacitively coupled plasmas (CCPs) are ubiquitous, having several industrial applications, especially in the semiconductor industry. Inductive heating effects within these plasmas play an important role and therefore understanding them is key to improve industrial applications. For this purpose kinetic research, using particle-in-cell (PIC) codes, offers significant opportunity to study, and improve, industrial plasma processes that operate at the atomic level. However, PIC codes commonly used for CCPs are electrostatic and thus cannot be used to simulate electromagnetically induced currents. Therefore we have developed EPOCH-LTP, a 1D PIC code with a current heating model, that enables the simulation of inductive heating effects in HF CCPs. First simulation results, from an HF CCP (60 MHz) operated at 1 mTorr of argon, show that inductive currents couple most of their power to the electrons at the interface between the bulk plasma and the sheath. Furthermore, the simulation of a dual-frequency CCP, where a HF inductive current and a low-frequency (LF) voltage waveform at 400 kHz are applied, have shown a synergy between the HF and LF waveforms that increase the inductive heating rate.

PHARE: Parallel hybrid particle-in-cell code with patch-based adaptive mesh refinement

Modeling multi-scale collisionless magnetized processes constitutes an important numerical challenge. By treating electrons as a fluid and ions kinetically, the so-called hybrid Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes represent a promising intermediary between fully kinetic codes, limited to model small scales and short durations, and magnetohydrodynamic codes used large scale. However, simulating processes at scales significantly larger than typical ion particle dynamics while resolving sub-ion dissipative current sheets remain extremely difficult. This paper presents a new hybrid PIC code with patch-based adaptive mesh refinement. Here, hybrid PIC equations are solved on a hierarchy of an arbitrary number of Cartesian meshes of incrementally finer resolution dynamically mapping regions of interest, and with a refined time stepping. This paper presents how the hybrid PIC algorithm is adapted to evolve such mesh hierarchy and the validation of the code on a uniform mesh, fixed refined mesh and dynamically refined mesh.

Quantitative proton radiography and shadowgraphy for arbitrary intensities

Charged-particle radiography and shadowgraphy data can be directly inverted to obtain a line-integrated transverse Lorentz force or a line-integrated transverse refractive index gradient if intensity modulations due to scattering and absorption are negligible, and angular deflections are small. We develop a new direct-inversion algorithm based on plasma physics and compare it to a new Monge–Ampère code and an existing power diagram code (Kasim et al., 2017). The measured or source intensity is represented by electrons subject to drag, and the other intensity by fixed ions. The decrease in kinetic plus electrostatic energy determines convergence. The displacement of the electrons from their initial to their equilibrium positions determines the line-integrated force or refractive index gradient. We have implemented two approaches: PIC (particle in cell) and Lagrangian fluid, in 1-D and 2-D. The PIC code works for arbitrary intensities, can work efficiently in parallel, and can make use of existing codes. The Lagrangian code requires less memory and is faster than the PIC code without massively parallel processing, but fails in 2-D for large intensity modulations. The Monge–Ampère code is by far the fastest in 2-D, without massively parallel processing, but fails for intensities with large voids, high contrast ratios and large deflections across the boundaries, and could not obtain the degree of convergence possible with the PIC code. The power diagram code was by far the slowest and most memory intensive, and failed for large peaks in the measured intensity.

RelSIM: A Relativistic Semi-implicit Method for Particle-in-cell Simulations

We present a novel Relativistic Semi-Implicit Method (RelSIM) for particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of astrophysical plasmas, implemented in a code framework ready for production runs. While explicit PIC methods have gained widespread recognition in the astrophysical community as a reliable tool to simulate plasma phenomena, implicit methods have been seldom explored. This is partly due to the lack of a reliable relativistic implicit PIC formulation that is applicable to state-of-the-art simulations. We propose the RelSIM to fill this gap: our new method is relatively simple, being free of nonlinear iterations and only requiring a global linear solve of the field equations. With a set of one- and two-dimensional tests, we demonstrate that the RelSIM produces more accurate results with much smaller numerical errors in the total energy than standard explicit PIC, in particular when characteristic plasma scales (skin depth and plasma frequency) are heavily underresolved on the numerical grid. By construction, the RelSIM also performs much better than the relativistic implicit-moment method, originally proposed for semi-implicit PIC simulations in the relativistic regime. Our results are promising to conduct large-scale (in terms of duration and domain size) PIC simulations of astrophysical plasmas, potentially reaching physical regimes inaccessible by standard explicit PIC codes.

SFQEDtoolkit: A high-performance library for the accurate modeling of strong-field QED processes in PIC and Monte Carlo codes

Strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED) processes are central in determining the dynamics of particles and plasmas in extreme electromagnetic fields such as those present in the vicinity of compact astrophysical objects or generated with ultraintense lasers. SFQEDtoolkit is an open source library designed to allow users for a straightforward implementation of SFQED processes in existing particle-in-cell (PIC) and Monte Carlo codes. Through advanced function approximation techniques, high-energy photon emission and electron-positron pair creation probability rates and energy distributions are calculated within the locally-constant-field approximation (LCFA) as well as with more advanced models [Phys. Rev. A 99, 022125 (2019)]. SFQEDtoolkit is designed to provide users with high-performance and high-accuracy, and neat examples showing its usage are provided. In the near future, SFQEDtoolkit will be enriched to model the angular distribution of the generated particles, i.e., beyond the commonly employed collinear emission approximation, as well as to model spin and polarization dependent SFQED processes. Notably, the generality and flexibility of the presented function approximation approach makes it suitable to be employed in other areas of physics, chemistry and computer science. Program summaryProgram Title: SFQEDtoolkit (version 1.0)CPC Library link to program files:https://doi.org/10.17632/j7mhj3cg3m.1Developer's repository link:https://github.com/QuantumPlasma/SFQEDtoolkitLicensing provisions: GPLv3Programming language: C++, FortranNature of problem: The accurate simulation of strong-field QED processes in the interaction of particles or plasmas with strong electromagnetic fields is critical for present and future experiments with ultraintense lasers as well as to unveil the dynamics around compact astrophysical objects. State-of-the-art PIC and Monte Carlo codes implement strong-field QED processes by means of lookup tables, where the approximated function is evaluated on a fixed set of points. This typically results in numerical artifacts such as stairlike structures in the approximated function, and in a reduced efficiency when large size lookup tables are necessary. An easily implementable open-source accurate and efficient simulation tool is required to address problems at the high-intensity frontier of plasma physics and astrophysics.Solution method: Strong-field QED process rates and particle distributions are calculated by leveraging advanced approximation methods based on variable and function transformation, asymptotic expansions as well as Chebyshev polynomial expansions. This provides a numerically-stable and efficient approach that allows us to overcome all limitations of existing methods based on standard lookup tables.

Particle-in-cell Simulations of Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection with Advanced Maxwell Solver Algorithms

Relativistic magnetic reconnection is a nonideal plasma process that is a source of nonthermal particle acceleration in many high-energy astrophysical systems. Particle-in-cell (PIC) methods are commonly used for simulating reconnection from first principles. While much progress has been made in understanding the physics of reconnection, especially in 2D, the adoption of advanced algorithms and numerical techniques for efficiently modeling such systems has been limited. With the GPU-accelerated PIC code WarpX, we explore the accuracy and potential performance benefits of two advanced Maxwell solver algorithms: a nonstandard finite-difference scheme (CKC) and an ultrahigh-order pseudo-spectral method (PSATD). We find that, for the relativistic reconnection problem, CKC and PSATD qualitatively and quantitatively match the standard Yee-grid finite-difference method. CKC and PSATD both admit a time step that is 40% longer than that of Yee, resulting in a ∼40% faster time to solution for CKC, but no performance benefit for PSATD when using a current deposition scheme that satisfies Gauss’s law. Relaxing this constraint maintains accuracy and yields a 30% speedup. Unlike Yee and CKC, PSATD is numerically stable at any time step, allowing for a larger time step than with the finite-difference methods. We found that increasing the time step 2.4–3 times over the standard Yee step still yields accurate results, but it only translates to modest performance improvements over CKC, due to the current deposition scheme used with PSATD. Further optimization of this scheme will likely improve the effective performance of PSATD.

A pseudospectral implicit particle-in-cell method with exact energy and charge conservation

The standard particle-in-cell (PIC) method employs explicit finite-difference (FD) schemes, such as the leap-frog scheme, for spatial and temporal integrations. In this study, we introduce a novel approach by employing a pseudospectral method for solving the Poisson equation and adopting a fully implicit time integration technique to achieve exact energy conservation. The pseudospectral field solver offers the advantage of spectral accuracy in obtaining field solutions. Previous investigations on implicit time integration of PIC FD equations have demonstrated the capability of enforcing precise energy exchange between the field and particles, resulting in energy-conserving schemes. We prove that the exact energy conservation property can be extended to the pseudospectral scheme. Additionally, we provide a solution to ensure a pseudospectral charge continuity equation. To validate our methodology, we implement the new scheme in a 2D electrostatic PIC code and present numerical examples that confirm the theoretical findings.

High-energy synchrotron flares powered by strongly radiative relativistic magnetic reconnection: 2D and 3D PIC simulations

ABSTRACT The time evolution of high-energy synchrotron radiation generated in a relativistic pair plasma energized by reconnection of strong magnetic fields is investigated with 2D and 3D particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The simulations in this 2D/3D comparison study are conducted with the radiative PIC code OSIRIS, which self-consistently accounts for the synchrotron radiation reaction on the emitting particles, and enables us to explore the effects of synchrotron cooling. Magnetic reconnection causes compression of the plasma and magnetic field deep inside magnetic islands (plasmoids), leading to an enhancement of the flaring emission, which may help explain some astrophysical gamma-ray flare observations. Although radiative cooling weakens the emission from plasmoid cores, it facilitates additional compression there, further amplifying the magnetic field B and plasma density n, and thus partially mitigating this effect. Novel simulation diagnostics utilizing 2D histograms in the n-B space are developed and used to visualize and quantify the effects of compression. The n-B histograms are observed to be bounded by relatively sharp power-law boundaries marking clear limits on compression. Theoretical explanations for some of these compression limits are developed, rooted in radiative resistivity or 3D kinking instabilities. Systematic parameter-space studies with respect to guide magnetic field, system size, and upstream magnetization are conducted and suggest that stronger compression, brighter high-energy radiation, and perhaps significant quantum electrodynamic effects such as pair production, may occur in environments with larger reconnection-region sizes and higher magnetization, particularly when magnetic field strengths approach the critical (Schwinger) field, as found in magnetar magnetospheres.

Hybrid-VPIC: An open-source kinetic/fluid hybrid particle-in-cell code

Hybrid-VPIC is an extension of the open-source high-performance particle-in-cell (PIC) code VPIC incorporating hybrid kinetic ion/fluid electron solvers. This paper describes the models that are available in the code and gives an overview of applications of the code to space and laboratory plasma physics problems. Particular choices in how the hybrid solvers were implemented are documented for reference by users. A few solutions for handling numerical complications particular to hybrid codes are also described. Special emphasis is given to the computationally taxing problem of modeling mix in collisional high-energy-density regimes, for which more accurate electron fluid transport coefficients have been implemented for the first time in a hybrid PIC code.