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One-Dimensional Kinetic Particle-In-Cell Simulations Of Various Plasma Distributions, Richard N. Vanderburgh
One-Dimensional Kinetic Particle-In-Cell Simulations Of Various Plasma Distributions, Richard N. Vanderburgh
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A one-dimensional kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) MATLAB simulation was created to demonstrate the time-evolution of various plasma distributions. Building on previous plasma PIC programs written in FORTRAN and Python, this work recreates the computational and diagnostic tools of these packages in a more user- and educational-friendly development environment. Plasma quantities such as plasma frequency and species charge-mass ratios are arbitrarily defined. A one-dimensional spatial environment is defined by total length and number and size of spatial grid points. In the first time-step, charged particles are given initial positions and velocities on a spatial grid. After initialization, the program solves for the …