A hybrid fluid-kinetic plasma module for the Hyperion multi-physics code

Hyperion is a new high-fidelity simulation tool to model hohlraum physics in ICF experiments. A hybrid fluid-kinetic plasma module forms the backbone of this multi-physics code, and couples with the other physics modules for laser-ray tracing, LPI, and radiation transport using the Advanced Multi-Physics framework [1]. The plasma module solves the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation using Particle-In-Cell techniques for ion and hot electron species, while the bulk electrons are treated as a collisional fluid. A novel multi-scale algorithm has been developed [2] to treat collisions between the different kinetic plasma species, with a large range of collision frequencies, as well as the particle-bulk collisions. The kinetic PIC components of the algorithm have been implemented to run on GPUs and leverage the Cabana-PIC library developed under the Exascale Computing Project [3]. Details of this collisional plasma module will be described and results will be presented from verification studies, including simulations of a three-species plasma interpenetration problem [4].



[1] B. Philip et al., JCP, 286, 143–171 (2015)

[2] G. Chen et al., in preparation

[3] S.M. Mniszewski et al., IJHPCA, 35, 6 (2021)

[4] S. Le Pape et al., PRL, 124, 025003 (2020)