A novel Monte Carlo simulations code for electrons and ions including efficient variance reduction techniques

Fluid and kinetic models for non-equilibrium, low-temperature plasmas require accurate calculations of electrons and ions distribution functions, transport coefficients, and reaction rate coefficients from cross section data. These parameters are typically obtained from numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation using approximations for the distribution functions or from Monte Carlo simulations. In this work, we present a new open-source Monte Carlo simulations code for electrons and ions swarms. The implementation includes efficient variance reduction techniques, such as the Monte Carlo Flux, as well as dynamic particle weighting in non-conservative collisions, a modified time step algorithm, energy ranges with different null-collision frequencies and multi-core parallelization.In this work, we compare the computational cost of different variance reduction techniques typically used to simulate electrons and ions swarms. Moreover, the accuracy of the results is assessed by code benchmarking against conventional Monte Carlo simulations or multi-term solutions. Ultimately, the code can be used to check the validity of two-term solutions or directly coupled with plasma models.