A Binary Collision Method for Screened Coulomb Collisions in weakly and moderately coupled Plasmas

Abstract

A binary-pairing Monte Carlo collision method is presented here for screened Coulomb collisions in plasmas that is valid in the weakly and moderately coupled regimes. The method models the Fokker-Planck collision operator with first order corrections with respect to the Coulomb logarithm in the appropriate limits and identically reduces to a standard Monte Carlo method for solving the Boltzmann collision integral for screened Rutherford collisions when the time step is sufficiently small. The method is exceptionally simple and can be integrated into existing binary methods for cumulative scattering with the addition of about 10 lines of code.