Fluid preconditioning for Newton-Krylov-based, fully implicit, electrostatic particle-in-cell simulations

Abstract: A recent proof-of-principle study proposes an energy- and charge-conserving, nonlinearly implicit electrostatic particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm in one dimension [Chen et al, J. Comput. Phys., 230 (2011) 7018]. The algorithm in the reference employs an unpreconditioned Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov method, which ensures nonlinear convergence at every timestep (resolving the dynamical timescale of interest). Kinetic enslavement, which is one key component of the algorithm, not only enables fully implicit PIC a practical approach, but also allows preconditioning the kinetic solver with a fluid approximation. This study proposes such a preconditioner, in which the linearized moment equations are closed with moments computed from particles. Effective acceleration of the linear GMRES solve is demonstrated, on both uniform and non-uniform meshes. The algorithm performance is largely insensitive to the electron-ion mass ratio. Numerical experiments are performed on a 1D multi-scale ion acoustic wave test problem.