Electromagnetic full particle code with adaptive mesh refinement technique: Application to the current sheet evolution

Journal Article · Sat May 20 04:00:00 EDT 2006 · Journal of Computational Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2005.10.003· OSTI ID:20767045

Fujimoto, Keizo ^[1]; Machida, Shinobu ^[1]

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1. Department of Geophysics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa Oiwaketyo, Kyoto 606-8502 (Japan)

We have developed a new two and a half dimensional electromagnetic particle code with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique in an effort to give a self-consistent description of the dynamic change of the plasma sheet in association with magnetic reconnection, which includes multi-scale processes from the electron scale to the magnetohydrodynamic scale. The AMR technique subdivides and removes cells dynamically in accordance with a refinement criterion and it is quite effective to achieve high-resolution simulations of phenomena that locally include micro-scale processes. Since the number of particles per cell decreases in the subdivided cells and a numerical noise increases, we subdivide not only cells but also particles therein and control the number of particles per cell. Our code is checked against several well-known processes such as the Landau damping of the Langmuir waves and we show that the AMR technique and particle splitting algorithm are successfully applied to the conventional particle codes. We have also examined the nonlinear evolution of the Harris-type current sheet and realized basically the same properties as those in other full particle simulations. We show that the numbers of cells and particles are greatly reduced so that the time to complete the simulation is significantly shortened in our AMR code, which enables us to conduct large-scale simulations on the current sheet evolution.

• OSTI ID: 20767045
• Journal Information: Journal of Computational Physics, Journal Name: Journal of Computational Physics Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 214; ISSN JCTPAH; ISSN 0021-9991
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
ALGORITHMS
ELECTRONS
LANDAU DAMPING
MAGNETIC RECONNECTION
MATHEMATICAL EVOLUTION
NOISE
NONLINEAR PROBLEMS
PLASMA SHEET
RESOLUTION
SIMULATION