In plasma physics, the particle-in-cell (PIC) method refers to a technique used to solve a certain class of partial differential equations. In this method, individual particles (or fluid elements) in a Lagrangian frame are tracked in continuous phase space, whereas moments of the distribution such as densities and currents are computed simultaneously on Eulerian (stationary) mesh points. PIC methods were already in use as early as 1955, even before the first Fortran compilers were available. The method gained popularity for plasma simulation in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Buneman, Dawson, Hockney, Birdsall, Morse and others. In plasma physics applications, the method amounts to following the trajectories of charged particles in self-consistent electromagnetic (or electrostatic) fields computed on a fixed mesh.
Technical aspects For many types of problems, the classical PIC method invented by Buneman, Dawson, Hockney, Birdsall, Morse and others is relatively intuitive and straightforward to implement. This probably accounts for much of its success, particularly for plasma simulation, for which the method typically includes the following procedures:
Integration of the equations of motion. Interpolation of charge and current source terms to the field mesh. Computation of the fields on mesh points. Interpolation of the fields from the mesh to the particle locations. Models which include interactions of particles only through the average fields are called PM (particle-mesh). Those which include direct binary interactions are PP (particle-particle). Models with both types of interactions are called PP-PM or P3M. Since the early days, it has been recognized that the PIC method is susceptible to error from so-called discrete particle noise.
This error is statistical in nature, and today it remains less well-understood than for traditional fixed-grid methods, such as Eulerian or semi-Lagrangian schemes. Modern geometric PIC algorithms are based on a very different theoretical framework. These algorithms use tools of discrete manifold, interpolating differential forms, and canonical or non-canonical symplectic integrators to guarantee gauge invariant and conservation of charge, energy-momentum, and more importantly the infinitely dimensional symplectic structure of the particle-field system.
These desired features are attributed to the fact that geometric PIC algorithms are built on the more fundamental field-theoretical framework and are directly linked to the perfect form, i.e., the variational principle of physics.
Basics of the PIC plasma simulation technique Inside the plasma research community, systems of different species (electrons, ions, neutrals, molecules, dust particles, etc.) are investigated. The set of equations associated with PIC codes are therefore the Lorentz force as the equation of motion, solved in the so-called pusher or particle mover of the code, and Maxwell's equations determining the electric and magnetic fields, calculated in the (field) solver.
Super-particles The real systems studied are often extremely large in terms of the number of particles they contain. In order to make simulations efficient or at all possible, so-called super-particles are used. A super-particle (or macroparticle) is a computational particle that represents many real particles; it may be millions of electrons or ions in the case of a plasma simulation, or, for instance, a vortex element in a fluid simulation. It is allowed to rescale the number of particles, because the acceleration from the Lorentz force depends only on the charge-to-mass ratio, so a super-particle will follow the same trajectory as a real particle would. The number of real particles corresponding to a super-particle must be chosen such that sufficient statistics can be collected on the particle motion. If there is a significant difference between the density of different species in the system (between ions and neutrals, for instance), separate real to super-particle ratios can be used for them.
The particle mover Even with super-particles, the number of simulated particles is usually very large (> 105), and often the particle mover is the most time consuming part of PIC, since it has to be done for each particle separately. Thus, the pusher is required to be of high accuracy and speed and much effort is spent on optimizing the different schemes. The schemes used for the particle mover can be split into two categories, implicit and explicit solvers. While implicit solvers (e.g. implicit Euler scheme) calculate the particle velocity from the already updated fields, explicit solvers use only the old force from the previous time step, and are therefore simpler and faster, but require a smaller time step. In PIC simulation the leapfrog method is used, a second-order explicit method. Also the Boris algorithm is used which cancels out the magnetic field in the Newton-Lorentz equation. For plasma applications, the leapfrog method takes the following form:
x k + 1 − x k Δ t = v k + 1 / 2 , {\displaystyle {\frac {\mathbf {x} _{k+1}-\mathbf {x} _{k}}{\Delta t}}=\mathbf {v} _{k+1/2},}
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