Explicit energy-conserving modification of relativistic PIC method

Abstract

The use of explicit particle-in-cell (PIC) method for relativistic plasma simulations is restricted by numerical heating and instabilities that may significantly constrain the choice of time and space steps. To partially eliminate these limitations we consider a possibility to enforce exact energy conservation by altering the standard time step splitting. Instead of updating particles in a given field and then the field using the current they produce, we consider subsystems that describe the coupling of a single particle and the field at the nearby nodes and solve them with enforced energy conservation sequentially for all particles, which is completed by the field update with zero current. Such an approach is compatible with various advances, ranging from accounting for additional physical effects to the use of numerical-dispersion-free field solvers, high-order weighting shapes and particle push subcycling. To facilitate further considerations and use, we provide a basic implementation in a 3D, relativistic, spectral code $\pi$-PIC, which we make publicly available. The method and its implementations are verified using simulations of cold plasma oscillations, Landau damping and relativistic two-stream instability. The capabilities of the method to deal with large time and space steps are demonstrated in the problem of plasma heating by intense incident radiation.