A guiding centre direct implicit scheme for magnetized plasma simulations

A new implicit fully electromagnetic particle in cell method is presented in which the full ion dynamic and all the electron guiding centre drifts of a magnetized collisionless plasma are retained. This code retains the inertial effects on the electrons. It must be used for time steps larger or so than an electron cyclotron period, it is only valid for an electron plasma beta β e < 1 . Therefore, it is efficient only with strongly magnetized electrons. On the opposite, the constraint on the ions β i < m i / m e (where m i / m e is the ion to electron mass ratio) is very weak. This method allows for the simulation of an ion-beam instability (triggering electrostatic ion cyclotron waves and filamentation of the plasma), the propagation of MHD waves, and ion-temperature anisotropies (mirror and/or cyclotron waves), at a relatively low cost. This method could become a useful tool for the modelization of space plasmas, quite complementary with other methods such as Hall-MHD, hybrid codes, or other implicit particle codes.