Code Verification 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 particles, error sources arise from the stochastic collision sampling, the field errors, and the time integration. For the fields, error sources arise from the space discretization, finite particle sampling, and particle position errors. 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 presentation, we present our code-verification work for collisional plasma dynamics.