A hybrid symplectic PIC/spectral scheme for one-dimensional electrostatic simulations

Conference · Tue Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1996

OSTI ID:489408

Doxas, I; Cary, J R ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)

We develop a hybrid PIC/spectral integration scheme based on the explicit symplectic integrator of reference. We find that for low-accuracy short-term integration (5% accuracy over {omega}{sub p}t = 500) the second-order symplectic method is most efficient, outperforming the fourth-order method by 65% and non-symplectic methods such as Runge-Kutta, Bulirsch-Stoer and {open_quote}naive{close_quote} leap-frog by a factor of 3-10. For high-accuracy short-term integration (10{sup -4} over w{sub p}t = 500) the second-order symplectic method is 20% more efficient than both the fourth-order method and Bulirsch-Stoer, and a factor of 8-20 more efficient than Runge-Kutta and {open_quote}naive{close_quote} leap-frog. For long-term integration (w{sub p}t = 10{sup 5}) the second order symplectic method outperforms all non-symplectic methods by a factor of 8-20. We also show that the symplectic method is more robust to roundoff error than all other methods we tested, and that for simulations with a small number of particles per wavelength (usuall in plasma simulations) cubic spline interpolation is more efficient that linear interpolation.

• OSTI ID: 489408
• Report Number(s): CONF-960354--
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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