Object Oriented PIC Code With Upgraded Physics and Platform Independent GUI
Abstract
The relativistic radiation damping and accompanying electron self-force is, in principle, properly modeled by the standard PIC (particle-in-cell) algorithm; however, due to grid resolution and time step constraints, there is no possibility of directly simulating the fields of the emitted radiation over a spectrum sufficient to include a significant fraction of the radiated power, so a scheme has been developed to correct for these errors. A model for secondary emission of electrons from arbitrary surfaces with user definable coefficients has been developed and implemented in the XOOPIC (XII-based Object-Oriented Particle-In-Cell) code, allowing for separate secondary emission treatment of each species incident on each boundary. A literature survey determined the four algorithms most relevant to treating electromagnetic boundary conditions in a PIC model, along with their respective strengths and weaknesses. The errors in the generic PIC algorithm have been analyzed in the electrostatic limit, and an initial extension of this analysis to the generic electromagnetic PIC scheme was developed. A large subset of the existing XOOPIC GUI, which runs only under Unix, has been ported to a new cross-platform windowing library, called Qt, that runs equally well on Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT and all versions of Unix.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 29, 1999
- Accession Number
- ADA366258
Entities
People
- David L. Bruhwiler
- John Verboncoeur
- Kelly Luetkemeyer