Particle simulation methods in plasma physics

A brief survey of particle simulation methods is presented. Section 2 outlines the particle-mesh (PM) method for collisonless phase fluids. Section 3 describes how PM is extended to make simulation studies of dense plasmas feasible: The particle-particle/particle-mesh (P3 M) algorithms reduces the cost saling to αNp from the αNp2 for conventional methods, where Np is the number of particles. Section 4 summarises particle modelling of fluids and magnetofluids. New algorithms (EPIC schemes) arise when the optimisation of collisionless PM models are applied to the fluid and MHD equations. These are shown to outperform state-of-the-art finite difference schemes in both cost and performance. (orig.)