Particle Injector

Particle injectors provide a continuous flow of fresh macro-particles from the boundaries into the simulation domain.

The method implemented in Smilei

In the PIC loop structure, the particle injection occurs after current projection on the grid, particle sorting and synchronizations. Injected macro-particles therefore do not contribute to the current and fields of the current iteration but they are taken into account in the diagnostics.

../_images/particle_injector.png

Recommendation

  • Although a single species may be injected, we recommend to inject both positively and negatively charged species at the same time to ensure a neutral plasma. To strengthen neutrality, species may be created at the same positions.

  • If the particle momentum is drawn from a Maxwellian, we recommend to use a random positionning instead of the regular one. Regular positionning may induce numerical effects such as loss of charge and spurious field near the boundary. The reason is explained in the following figure. The regular positionning works when injecting a drifting cold plasma with a drift velocity sufficiently high to let the particles entering the simulation domain.

../_images/particle_injector_regular_random.png

Implementation

The particle injector algorithm is coded in the file Patch/VectorPatch.cpp in the function injectParticlesFromBoundaries.

The class ParticleInjector manages the injector’s parameters and properties, while new macro-particles are initialized using the class ParticleCreator.