Latest progress on the reduced-order particle-in-cell scheme: II. Quasi-3D implementation and verification
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Reza, M
Faraji, F
Knoll, A
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Across many plasma applications, the underlying phenomena and interactions among the involved processes are known to exhibit three-dimensional characteristics. Furthermore, the global properties and evolution of plasma systems are often determined by a process called inverse energy cascade, where kinetic plasma processes at the microscopic scale interact and lead to macroscopic coherent structures. These structures can have a major impact on the stability of plasma discharges, with detrimental effects on the operation and performance of plasma technologies. Kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) methods offer a sufficient level of fidelity to capture these processes and behaviors. However, three-dimensional PIC simulations that can cost-effectively overcome the curse of dimensionality and enable full-scale simulations of real-world time significance have remained elusive. Tackling the enormous computational cost issue associated with conventional PIC schemes, the computationally efficient reduced-order (RO) PIC approach provides a viable path to 3D simulations of real-size plasma systems. This part II paper builds upon the improvements to the RO-PIC’s underpinning formulation discussed in part I and extends the novel ‘first-order’ RO-PIC formulation to 3D. The resulting Quasi-3D (Q3D) implementation is rigorously verified in this paper, both at the module level of the Q3D reduced-dimension Poisson solver and at the global PIC code level. The plasma test cases employed correspond to 3D versions of the 2D configurations studied in part I, specifically: (a) a 3D problem involving electron plasma oscillations with Landau damping, and (b) a 3D extension to the Diocotron instability problem. The detailed verifications of the Q3D RO-PIC confirm that it maintains the expected levels of cost-efficiency and accuracy, demonstrating the ability of the approach to indistinguishably reproduce full-3D simulation results at a fraction of the computational cost.
Date Issued
2025-08-01
Date Acceptance
2025-07-22
Citation
Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 2025, 67 (8)
ISSN
0741-3335
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Journal / Book Title
Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion
Volume
67
Issue
8
Copyright Statement
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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Publication Status
Published
Article Number
085006
Date Publish Online
2025-07-31