Verification and Performance Evaluation of a Massively Parallel PIC-MCC Code for Low-Temperature ExB Plasma Simulation

The Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method with Monte Carlo Collisions (MCC) is a widely accepted approach for simulating low-temperature plasmas (LTP). Given the diverse range of LTP-based problems, several independent 2D PIC codes with different implementation strategies have been developed by research groups worldwide, making verification and benchmarking essential. In this work, we present the verification and benchmarking [1] of our in-house, massively parallel 2D-3V PIC-MCC [2], including a step-by-step validation using multiple test cases [3], demonstrating excellent agreement with published literature in terms of densities, energies, and dispersion relations. We also present the performance evaluation of our novel charge deposition strategy to address the scalability bottleneck for parallel PIC codes. Additionally, we present a detailed spatio-temporal analysis of the phase-space data obtained from simulation of an ExB plasma based system, specifically EDFs and highlight how collision dynamics influence the evolution of ExB instabilities.

[1] T Charoy et al 2019 Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 28 105010

[2] Chaudhury, B. et al. (2019) Hybrid Parallelization of (PIC-MCC) SCEC 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 964.

[3] Pietro Parodi, Federico Petronio; Phys. Plasmas 1 January 2025; 32 (1): 013902.