Low Noise Electrostatic and Electromagnetic Delta-f Particle-in-Cell Simulation of Plasmas

Abstract

This paper presents a method for performing efficient and accurate particle simulations of weakly growing instabilities found in both laboratory and space plasmas. This low noise technique is based on a particle-in-cell (PIC) formulation of the equations for the perturbed plasma charged particle distribution function. This technique substantially reduces the number of particles one needs for discrete sampling since only the perturbed distribution is represented by particles. In this work results of simulations are presented from several classes of electrostatic and electromagnetic instabilities driven by velocity space nonuniformity. Simulation results from studies of linear and nonlinear Landau damping are also presented.