Canonicalization and symplectic simulation of the gyrocenter dynamics in time-independent magnetic fields

The gyrocenter dynamics of charged particles in time-independent magnetic fields is a non-canonical Hamiltonian system. The canonical description of the gyrocenter has both theoretical and practical importance. We provide a general procedure of the gyrocenter canonicalization, which is expressed by the series of a small variable Ïμ depending only on the parallel velocity u and can be expressed in a recursive manner. We prove that the truncation of the series to any given order generates a set of exact canonical coordinates for a system, whose Lagrangian approximates to that of the original gyrocenter system in the same order. If flux surfaces exist for the magnetic field, the series stops simply at the second order and an exact canonical form of the gyrocenter system is obtained. With the canonicalization schemes, the canonical symplectic simulation of gyrocenter dynamics is realized for the first time. The canonical symplectic algorithm has the advantage of good conservation properties and long-term numerical accuracy, while avoiding numerical instability. It is worth mentioning that explicitly expressing the canonical Hamiltonian in new coordinates is usually difficult and impractical. We give an iteration procedure that is easy to implement in the original coordinates associated with the coordinate transformation. This is crucial for modern large-scale simulation studies in plasma physics. The dynamics of gyrocenters in the dipole magnetic field and in the toroidal geometry are simulated using the canonical symplectic algorithm by comparison with the higher-order non symplectic Runge-Kutta scheme. The overwhelming superiorities of the symplectic method for the gyrocenter system are evidently exhibited.