Our new seminal publication “An implicit, conservative electrostatic particle-in-cell algorithm for paraxial magnetic nozzles” has just been published in the Journal of Computational Physics. Co-authored by Pedro Jiménez, Luis Chacon, and Mario Merino , this publication marks an important milestone for the ZARATHUSTRA project.

In this work we introduce for the first time a new Implicit Particle in Cell algorithm in a paraxial Magnetic Nozzle geometry. We generalized a novel particle mover in mapped meshes with strict conservation of total energy and local charge. To ensure its effectiveness, we tested the algorithm with several test cases and magnetic nozzle results from literature. Our results clearly show that this new algorithm has a remarkable performance gain compared to conventional algorithms, while maintaining comparable or superior accuracy.

You can read the paper here.