Appropriate use of the particle-in-cell method in low temperature plasmas: Application to the simulation of negative ion extraction

Abstract

The Particle-In-Cell Monte Carlo Collision (PIC MCC) method has been used by different authors in the last ten years to describe negative ion extraction in the context of neutral beam injection for fusion. Questionable results on the intensity and profile of the extracted negative ion beamlets have been presented in several recently published papers. Using a standard explicit PIC MCC method, we show that these results are due to a non-compliance with the constraints of the numerical method (grid spacing, number of particles per cell) and to a non-physical generation of the simulated plasma. We discuss in detail the conditions of mesh convergence and plasma generation and show that the results can significantly deviate from the correct solution and lead to unphysical features when the constraints inherent to the method are not strictly fulfilled. This paper illustrates the importance of verification in any plasma simulation. Since the results presented in this paper have been obtained with careful verification of the method, we propose them as benchmarks for future comparisons between different simulation codes for negative ion extraction.