Speaker
Description
One of the great challenges of plasma astrophysics is understanding the interplay between large- and small-scale dynamics in inherently multiscale phenomena such as turbulence, magnetic reconnection, shocks, and particle acceleration. The vast separation of scales between the fluid-like, macroscopic dynamics and microscopic electron kinetics involved in those processes poses major theoretical and numerical difficulties.
The semi-implicit algorithm implemented in iPic3D was conceived as a possible tool to tackle this problem. Different from explicit formulations, which have to solve the smallest scales in the system to maintain numerical stability, iPic3D ensures stability by exploiting the numerical dissipation coming from its semi-implicit formulation. The latter allows for a fully kinetic description of the dynamics in which electron spatial and temporal scales are not fully resolved.
In this talk, I’ll review a few results from iPic3D that demonstrate the effectiveness of the iPic3D strategy for studying multi-scale fundamental linear and nonlinear plasma processes, such as wave-particle interactions, magnetic reconnection, turbulence, and dynamo. These studies illustrate the key role of electron kinetics in multiscale plasma dynamics and iPic3D’s ability to capture these effects, thereby bridging electron-scale physics and macroscopic behaviour.