TY - JOUR
T1 - Pegasus
T2 - A new hybrid-kinetic particle-in-cell code for astrophysical plasma dynamics
AU - Kunz, Matthew Walter
AU - Stone, James McLellan
AU - Bai, Xue Ning
N1 - Funding Information:
Support for M.W.K. was provided by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Number PF1-120084 , issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS8-03060 . Support for X.-N.B. was provided by NASA through Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Number HST-HF-51301.01-A , issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS5-26555 . The Texas Advanced Computer Center at The University of Texas at Austin provided HPC resources under grant number TG-AST090105 , as did the PICSciE-OIT TIGRESS High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by NSF grant OCI-1053575 . Aspects of this work were facilitated by the Max-Planck/Princeton Center for Plasma Physics. The authors would like to thank Greg Hammett and Elena Belova for their encouragement, for their suggestions on how to improve our numerical algorithm, and for introducing us to the δf method; Anatoly Spitkovsky for fruitful discussions regarding the optimization of PIC algorithms; Damiano Caprioli for his assistance setting up the shock test problem; Lehman Garrison for providing his optimized digital filter algorithm; Joshua Dolence and Ammar Hakim for their advice with coding issues; Tobias Heinemann for useful conversations regarding the shearing-sheet formalism in the context of the hybrid-kinetic equations; and Alexander Schekochihin and Steven Cowley for sharing their expertise on multiscale plasma kinetics and inspiring much of the work presented here.
PY - 2014/2/15
Y1 - 2014/2/15
N2 - We describe Pegasus, a new hybrid-kinetic particle-in-cell code tailored for the study of astrophysical plasma dynamics. The code incorporates an energy-conserving particle integrator into a stable, second-order-accurate, three-stage predictor-predictor-corrector integration algorithm. The constrained transport method is used to enforce the divergence-free constraint on the magnetic field. A δf scheme is included to facilitate a reduced-noise study of systems in which only small departures from an initial distribution function are anticipated. The effects of rotation and shear are implemented through the shearing-sheet formalism with orbital advection. These algorithms are embedded within an architecture similar to that used in the popular astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics code Athena, one that is modular, well-documented, easy to use, and efficiently parallelized for use on thousands of processors. We present a series of tests in one, two, and three spatial dimensions that demonstrate the fidelity and versatility of the code.
AB - We describe Pegasus, a new hybrid-kinetic particle-in-cell code tailored for the study of astrophysical plasma dynamics. The code incorporates an energy-conserving particle integrator into a stable, second-order-accurate, three-stage predictor-predictor-corrector integration algorithm. The constrained transport method is used to enforce the divergence-free constraint on the magnetic field. A δf scheme is included to facilitate a reduced-noise study of systems in which only small departures from an initial distribution function are anticipated. The effects of rotation and shear are implemented through the shearing-sheet formalism with orbital advection. These algorithms are embedded within an architecture similar to that used in the popular astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics code Athena, one that is modular, well-documented, easy to use, and efficiently parallelized for use on thousands of processors. We present a series of tests in one, two, and three spatial dimensions that demonstrate the fidelity and versatility of the code.
KW - Hybrid
KW - Numerical methods
KW - Particle-in-cell
KW - Plasma
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jcp.2013.11.035
DO - 10.1016/j.jcp.2013.11.035
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84890384845
SN - 0021-9991
VL - 259
SP - 154
EP - 174
JO - Journal of Computational Physics
JF - Journal of Computational Physics
ER -