JC-PIC: kinetic (PIC-MCC) simulation of lowtemperature plasmas with a documented library of one hundred test cases

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, particle-in-cell simulations with Monte Carlo collisions (PIC-MCC) have given the low-temperature plasma community much of what it knows about electron heating in RF discharges, sheaths and secondary emission, striations, and the instabilities of magnetised plasmas. But these results remain in papers, and in codes that only their authors can run. JC-PIC is a free Windows program: a one-dimensional, three-velocity (1D3V) electrostatic PIC-MCC code with a parallel Fortran engine (OpenMP) and a complete graphical interface. It is built around a library of about one hundred ready-to-run cases, each documented, referenced and explained. About half of them reproduce a published result under the original conditions; the others compare the code with a classical analytical result. This overview presents the program, its companion book, and six of the cases from the physics point of view: Langmuir waves from Landau damping to electron trapping, the heating-mode transition in argon RF discharges, the electrical asymmetry effect, the Franck-Hertz experiment treated as a swarm, the striations of a positive column, and the ExB drift instability of Hall thrusters.