Kinetic Solvers with Adaptive Mesh in Phase Space for Low-Temperature Plasmas

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and implementation of adaptive mesh kinetic solvers for low-temperature plasmas, enabling efficient simulation of plasma dynamics and electron behavior in inhomogeneous electric fields.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled kinetic and electrostatic solver with adaptive mesh refinement in phase space, improving simulation efficiency without phase-space splitting.

Findings

Efficient coupling of kinetic and electrostatic solvers demonstrated.

Adaptive mesh improves simulation of plasma expansion and electron acceleration.

Analysis of runaway electron generation in inhomogeneous fields.

Abstract

We describe the implementation of 1d1v and 1d2v Vlasov and Fokker-Planck kinetic solvers with adaptive mesh refinement in phase space (AMPS) and coupling these kinetic solvers to Poisson equation solver for electric field. We demonstrate that coupling AMPS kinetic and electrostatic solvers can be done efficiently without splitting phase-space transport. We show that Eulerian fluid and kinetic solvers with dynamically adaptive Cartesian mesh can be used for simulations of collisionless plasma expansion into vacuum. The Vlasov-Fokker-Planck solver is demonstrated for the analysis of electron acceleration and scattering as well as the generation of runaway electrons in spatially inhomogeneous electric fields.