Verification of a Fully Implicit Particle-in-Cell Method for the $v_\parallel$ Formalism of Electromagnetic Gyrokinetics in the XGC Code

TL;DR

This paper implements and verifies a fully implicit particle-in-cell method for electromagnetic gyrokinetics in the XGC code, effectively addressing numerical stability and cancellation issues in the $v_ parallel$-formalism.

Contribution

The paper introduces a stable, fully implicit discretization of the $v_ parallel$-formalism in gyrokinetics within XGC, avoiding skin terms and numerical instabilities.

Findings

Stable simulation of shear Alfvén waves achieved.

Successful demonstration of ITG-KBM transition modeling.

Verification against existing gyrokinetic codes confirms accuracy.

Abstract

A fully implicit particle-in-cell method for handling the $v_\parallel$-formalism of electromagnetic gyrokinetics has been implemented in XGC. By choosing the $v_\parallel$-formalism, we avoid introducing the non-physical skin terms in Amp\`{e}re's law, which are responsible for the well-known ``cancellation problem" in the $p_\parallel$-formalism. The $v_\parallel$-formalism, however, is known to suffer from a numerical instability when explicit time integration schemes are used due to the appearance of a time derivative in the particle equations of motion from the inductive component of the electric field. Here, using the conventional $\delta f$ scheme, we demonstrate that our implicitly discretized algorithm can provide numerically stable simulation results with accurate dispersive properties. We verify the algorithm using a test case for shear Alfv\'{e}n wave propagation in addition to a case demonstrating the ITG-KBM transition. The ITG-KBM transition case is compared to results obtained from other $\delta f$ gyrokinetic codes/schemes, whose verification has already been archived in the literature.