PHARE : Parallel hybrid particle-in-cell code with patch-based adaptive mesh refinement

• Main Authors: Aunai, Nicolas, Smets, Roch, Ciardi, Andrea, Deegan, Philip, Jeandet, Alexis, Payet, Thibault, Guyot, Nathan, Darrieumerlou, Loic
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 14-10-2023
• Subjects: Physics - Computational Physics; Physics - Fluid Dynamics; Physics - Plasma Physics; Physics - Space Physics
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2210.14580

Modeling multi-scale collisionless magnetized processes constitutes an
important numerical challenge. By treating electrons as a fluid and ions
kinetically, the so-called hybrid Particle-In-Cell (PIC) codes represent a
promising intermediary between fully kinetic codes, limited to model small
scales and short durations, and magnetohydrodynamic codes used large scale.
However, simulating processes at scales significantly larger than typical ion
particle dynamics while resolving sub-ion dissipative current sheets remain
extremely difficult. This paper presents a new hybrid PIC code with patch-based
adaptive mesh refinement. Here, hybrid PIC equations are solved on a hierarchy
of an arbitrary number of Cartesian meshes of incrementally finer resolution
dynamically mapping regions of interest, and with a refined time stepping. This
paper presents how the hybrid PIC algorithm is adapted to evolve such mesh
hierarchy and the validation of the code on a uniform mesh, fixed refined mesh
and dynamically refined mesh.