GitHub

MiniPIC.jl

A minimal 1D electrostatic Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulation package for Julia.

Overview

MiniPIC.jl provides a simple yet efficient implementation of the particle-in-cell method for simulating collisionless plasmas. It solves the Vlasov-Poisson system using:

  • Leapfrog integration for particle trajectories
  • Second-order finite differences for the Poisson equation
  • Linear shape functions for charge deposition and field interpolation
  • Periodic boundary conditions

The package supports two PIC schemes:

  • MC-PIC (Momentum-Conserving): Standard PIC with centered electric field nodes
  • EC-PIC (Energy-Conserving): PIC with staggered electric field nodes

Installation

using Pkg
Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/OttTs/MiniPIC.jl")

Quick Start

using MiniPIC

# Set up a simple Landau damping simulation
Nₚ = 10000        # Number of particles
L = 2π            # Domain length

# Initialize particles: uniform positions with sinusoidal perturbation
x = rand(Nₚ) * L
v = randn(Nₚ)     # Maxwellian velocity distribution

# Define simulation parameters
p = Parameters(
    mesh_length = L,
    num_cells = 64,
    time_step = 0.1,
    num_steps = 200,
    charge = -1.0,
    mass = 1.0,
    weighting = L / Nₚ,
    permittivity = 1.0
)

# Run simulation
simulate!(x, v; parameters=p, file_name="landau_damping")

# Read results
using CSV, DataFrames
df = CSV.read("landau_damping.csv", DataFrame)

Contents