Local, Explicit, and Charge-Conserving Electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell Algorithm on Unstructured Grids

Abstract

We present a charge-conserving electromagnetic particle-in-cell (EM-PIC) algorithm on unstructured grids based on a finite element (FE) time-domain methodology with explicit field update, i.e., requiring no linear solver. The proposed explicit EM-PIC algorithm attains charge conservation from first principles by representing fields, currents, and charges by differential forms of various degrees, following the methodology put forth in reference [25]. The need for a linear solver is obviated by constructing a sparse approximate inverse (SPAI) for the FE system matrix, which also preserves the locality (sparsity) of the algorithm. We analyze in detail the residual error caused by SPAI on the motions of charged particles and beam trajectories and show that this error is several orders of magnitude smaller than the inherent error caused by the spatial and temporal discretizations.