Modeling tools for plasmas in the strongly-coupled state

Summary form only given. Strongly coupled plasmas are important to emerging applications including plasma opening switches, quantum information systems, ionospheric plasmas related to atmospheric explosions, and micro-plasma devices. Traditionally, researchers have used modeling and simulation with great success to help understand plasma behavior. However, present modeling tools usually assume that plasmas are in the weakly-coupled state. These assumptions include assuming that the number of particles in a Debye sphere is large, meaning that long-range effects are shielded out and are negligible. For strongly coupled plasmas, however, long-range forces can play a major role. Consequently, there is a need for new tools for simulating strongly coupled plasmas. One important part of developing any new computational tool is validating that tool against known experimental results. For strongly coupled plasmas, one of the most well-diagnosed examples is ultra-cold plasma. Therefore, ultra-cold plasmas offer an excellent opportunity for benchmarking new numerical approaches in modeling strongly-coupled phenomena. We will focus on two algorithms: grid-free and particle-particle-particle-mesh (P3M). Finally, we will prototype a GPU-accelerated version of the grid-free algorithm.