Implicit electromagnetic solver with plasma applications

Abstract

Summary form only given. Satisfying the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition when computing plasma or pure field evolution with electromagnetics is often computationally prohibitive. For example, when computing the propagation of ion-cyclotron waves in fusion plasmas, the CFL condition leads to the requirement of a time step 103 times smaller than the time scales of physical interest. We have developed a new, scalable EM solver that gets around this condition. We have shown that this solver takes roughly 10× the computational work for one step, but we have been able to use it to take time steps that are 100× greater, thus resulting in a factor of 10 in savings of computing time. Thus, the solver allows one to efficiently retain inductive effects while taking time steps much greater than that allowed by the explicit CFL condition. Verification studies and applications to low-temperature plasmas and inductive modeling will be presented.