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Recovering the Damping Rates of Cyclotron Damped Plasma Waves from Simulation Data

Part of: Time-dependent statistical mechanics (dynamic and nonequilibrium) Numerical methods in Fourier analysis Partial differential equations, initial value and time-dependent initial-boundary value problems Astronomy and astrophysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2017

Cedric Schreiner ,
Patrick Kilian  and
Felix Spanier
Cedric Schreiner*
Affiliation:
Centre for Space Research, North-West University, Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa Lehrstuhl für Astronomie, Universität Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany
Patrick Kilian*
Affiliation:
Centre for Space Research, North-West University, Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa
Felix Spanier*
Affiliation:
Centre for Space Research, North-West University, Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa
*
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:cschreiner@astro.uni-wuerzburg.de (C. Schreiner), mail@petschge.de (P. Kilian), felix@fspanier.de (F. Spanier)
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:cschreiner@astro.uni-wuerzburg.de (C. Schreiner), mail@petschge.de (P. Kilian), felix@fspanier.de (F. Spanier)
*Corresponding author. Email addresses:cschreiner@astro.uni-wuerzburg.de (C. Schreiner), mail@petschge.de (P. Kilian), felix@fspanier.de (F. Spanier)
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Abstract

Plasma waves with frequencies close to the particular gyrofrequencies of the charged particles in the plasma lose energy due to cyclotron damping. We briefly discuss the gyro-resonance of low frequency plasma waves and ions particularly with regard to particle-in-cell (PiC) simulations. A setup is outlined which uses artificially excited waves in the damped regime of the wave mode's dispersion relation to track the damping of the wave's electromagnetic fields. Extracting the damping rate directly fromthe field data in real or Fourier space is an intricate and non-trivial task. We therefore present a simple method of obtaining the damping rate Γ from the simulation data. This method is described in detail, focusing on a step-by-step explanation of the course of actions. In a first application to a test simulation we find that the damping rates obtained from this simulation generally are in good agreement with theoretical predictions. We then compare the results of one-, two- and three-dimensional simulation setups and simulations with different physical parameter sets.

Keywords

Simulationspace physicsplasmacyclotron resonancewave damping

MSC classification

Secondary: 65M75: Probabilistic methods, particle methods, etc. 65T99: None of the above, but in this section 82C10: Quantum dynamics and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics (general) 85A30: Hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic problems
Type
Research Article
Information
Communications in Computational Physics , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , April 2017 , pp. 947 - 980
Copyright
Copyright © Global-Science Press 2017 

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