Verification of a Fully Implicit Particle-in-Cell Method for the $v_\parallel$ Formalism of Electromagnetic Gyrokinetics in the XGC Code

Abstract

A fully implicit particle-in-cell method for handling the $v_\parallel$-formalism of electromagnetic gyrokinetics has been implemented in XGC. By choosing the $v_\parallel$-formalism, we avoid introducing the non-physical skin terms in Ampère's law, which are responsible for the well-known ``cancellation problem" in the $p_\parallel$-formalism. The $v_\parallel$-formalism, however, is known to suffer from a numerical instability when explicit time integration schemes are used due to the appearance of a time derivative in the particle equations of motion from the inductive component of the electric field. Here, using the conventional $δf$ scheme, we demonstrate that our implicitly discretized algorithm can provide numerically stable simulation results with accurate dispersive properties. We verify the algorithm using a test case for shear Alfvén wave propagation in addition to a case demonstrating the ITG-KBM transition. The ITG-KBM transition case is compared to results obtained from other $δf$ gyrokinetic codes/schemes, whose verification has already been archived in the literature.