ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the electrostatic model of plasmas for particle simulation and the electromagnetic model of plasmas and the treatment of the Maxwell equations. The electromagnetic particle code is an extension of the electrostatic code to include the full electromagnetic effects. The Newtonian self-gravitational system can be described by "Poisson's equation" except for the difference in the attractive nature of the gravitational field. The simplest to implement is the periodic boundary condition. The chapter considers an algorithm of masking in the Maxwell equations which provides a good absorbing boundary condition for electromagnetic waves in electromagnetic particle codes. It also considers the following three versions of the magnetoinductive model: general model, canonical momentum model and 3D model. The electromagnetic boundary treatment is less developed. Among the most important conditions beside the periodic one is the absorbing boundary condition. The technique requires solving several finite difference equations to determine the "reflection" coefficients.