A Code-Verification Plan for Collisional Plasma Dynamics

Abstract

Particle-in-cell methods are commonly used in computational plasma physics to simulate plasma dynamics. These methods solve kinetic equations that resemble equations such as the Vlasov or Boltzmann equations and are typically coupled with electromagnetic field equations. These methods yield many code-verification challenges due to the various sources of numerical error and their possible interactions. For the kinetic equations, error sources arise from the number of computational particles, the time discretization, and the interpolation of the computational particles onto the spatial grid. For the field equations, error sources arise from the space and time discretizations. Code verification has been performed on computational physics codes associated with several physics disciplines; however, existing literature contains few instances of code verification for computational plasma dynamics, especially with collisions. In this work, we present our code-verification plan for collisional plasma dynamics.