Maximus: a Hybrid Particle-in-Cell Code for Microscopic Modeling of Collisionless Plasmas

TL;DR

Maximus is a new hybrid particle-in-cell simulation code designed for microscopic modeling of collisionless plasmas, featuring divergence-conserving algorithms, multispecies modeling, and efficient parallelization for supercomputers.

Contribution

It introduces a divergence-conserving hybrid particle-in-cell code with advanced features like multispecies modeling and adaptive time stepping for plasma simulations.

Findings

Accurately simulates shocked solar wind flow.

Demonstrates high parallelization efficiency on supercomputers.

Results agree well with space mission observations.

Abstract

A second-order accurate divergence-conserving hybrid particle-in-cell code Maximus has been developed for microscopic modeling of collisionless plasmas. The main specifics of the code include a constrained transport algorithm for exact conservation of magnetic field divergence, a Boris-type particle pusher, a weighted particle momentum deposit on the cells of the 3D spatial grid, an ability to model multispecies plasmas and an adaptive time step. The code is efficiently parallelized for running on supercomputers by means of the message passing interface (MPI) technology; an analysis of parallelization efficiency and overall resource intensity is presented. A Maximus simulation of the shocked flow in the Solar wind is shown to agree well with the observations of the Ion Release Module (IRM) aboard the Active Magnetospheric Particle Tracer Explorers interplanetary mission.