Tuesday

We present new results obtained from fully kinetic Particle-in-Cell simulations performed with an innovative approach enforcing the quasi-neutrality condition on the Vlasov-Maxwell system. This method particularly lends itself to successfully simulate computational demanding multiscale plasma processes within a reasonable time and with unconstrained space resolutions.

The model has already been successfully tested against the Weibel and the firehose instability, where it was observed to overcome the time-step/grid-size constraint of conventional schemes. More important applications are expected to be in the field of space weather, where physical processes can span a domain of thousands kilometers and last several hours, despite their very localized source.

As an ultimate benchmark, here we have considered the process of magnetic reconnection, which features an extension scale as large as several ion skin depths developing from a region as tiny as the electron scale.
Within this scenario, we have proved the Neutral-Vlasov model to perform in line with other robust methods based on an implicit Particle-in-Cell formulation, especially with the semi-implicit solvers currently considered to be the best compromise between accuracy and execution time, and to additionally obtain new interesting results in terms of the application range of the model.