# An improved immersed finte element particle-in-cell method for plasma simulation

## TL;DR

This paper presents an enhanced immersed finite element particle-in-cell (IFE-PIC) method for plasma simulation, improving accuracy and charge conservation, suitable for complex interface problems with Cartesian meshes.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel IFE-PIC method with a partially penalized IFE electric field solver and a new charge-conserving interpolation technique.

## Key findings

- Enhanced accuracy of electric field computation.
- Improved charge conservation in PIC implementation.
- Effective handling of complex interface problems.

## Abstract

The particle-in-cell (PIC) method has been widely used for plasma simulation, because of its noise-reduction capability and moderate computational cost. The immersed finite element (IFE) method is efficient for solving interface problems on Cartesian meshes, which is desirable for PIC method. The combination of these two methods provides an effective tool for plasma simulation with complex interface/boundary. This paper introduces an improved IFE-PIC method that enhances the performance in both IFE and PIC aspects. For the electric field solver, we adopt the newly developed partially penalized IFE method with enhanced accuracy. For PIC implementation, we introduce a new interpolation technique to ensure the conservation of the charge. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the features of the improved IFE-PIC method.