Benchmarking a Novel Hybrid Kinetic Model for Magnetized Plasmas

Simulating plasma devices is crucial to improving our understanding of how plasmas behave in different systems. While the robustness and speed of fluid simulations lend themselves to being a prevalent method of simulating plasmas, the technique has important drawbacks. Fluid simulations aren't able to capture Landau damping and other forms of plasma damping. One solution is to turn to kinetic simulations, but PIC codes are susceptible to noise and Vlasov codes can be extremely expensive to run for large systems. The Gkeyll simulation framework's novel Parallel Kinetic Perpendicular Moment (PKPM) model is a new model for weakly-collisional, magnetized plasmas. The model is derived from the distinct dynamics that occur parallel and perpendicular to the local magnetic field. By approximating plasma dynamics perpendicular to the magnetic field with a spectral expansion, this hybrid approach is much more computationally efficient. By simulating 1D Euler shocks and comparing the results to existing 5-moment fluid simulations, we can test the robustness of this scheme. We also simulate the Large Plasma Device at UCLA. Compared to existing fluid simulations, we aim to capture the plasma damping and its effect on the dynamics over time.