Simulation of current generation in a 3-D plasma model

Two wires carrying current in the same direction will attract each other, and two wires carrying current in the opposite direction will repel each other. Now, consider a test charge in a plasma. If the test charge carries current parallel to the plasma, then it will be pulled toward the plasma core, and if the test charge carries current anti-parallel to the plasma, then it will be pushed to the edge. The electromagnetic coupling between the plasma and a test charge (i.e., the Aparallel circ vparallel term in the test charge's Hamiltonian) breaks the symmetry in the parallel direction, and gives rise to a diffusion coefficient which is dependent on the particle's parallel velocity. This is the basis for the open-quotes preferential lossclose quotes mechanism described in the work by Nunan et al. In our previous 2+1/2 D work, in both cylindrical and toroidal geometries, showed that if the plasma column is centrally fueled, then an initial current increases steadily. The results in straight, cylindrical plasmas showed that self generated parallel current arises without trapped particle or neoclassical diffusion, as assumed by the bootstrap theory. It suggests that the fundamental mechanism seems to be the conservation of particles canonical momenta in the direction of the ignorable coordinate. We have extended the simulation to 3D to verify the model put forth. A scalable 3D EM-PIC code, with a localized field-solver, has been implemented to run on a large class of parallel computers. On the 512-node SP2 at Cornell Theory Center, we have benchmarked the 2+1/2 D calculations using 32 grids in the previously ignored direction, and a 100-fold increase in the number of particles. Our preliminary results show good agreements between the 2+1/2 D and the 3D calculations. We will present our 3D results at the meeting