Monte Carlo method and High Performance Computing for solving Fokker-Planck equation of minority plasma particles

TL;DR

This paper presents a Monte Carlo approach combined with high-performance computing techniques to efficiently solve the Fokker-Planck equation for minority plasma particles in tokamaks, focusing on energetic ions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of Monte Carlo methods with high-performance computing for modeling energetic ion distributions in plasma physics.

Findings

Successful application to tokamak plasma scenarios

Demonstrated computational efficiency improvements

Validated distribution function results

Abstract

This paper explains how to obtain the distribution function of minority ions in tokamak plasmas using the Monte Carlo method. Since the emphasis is on energetic ions, the guiding-center transformation is outlined, including also the transformation of the collision operator. Even within the guiding-center formalism, the fast particle simulations can still be very CPU intensive and, therefore, we introduce the reader also to the world of high-performance computing. The paper is concluded with a few examples where the presented method has been applied.