A technique for including 3D plasma turbulence in a two-dimensional plasma simulation Original Research Article

A technique for including 3-dimensional turbulence in 2-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations is described and validated. The technique is based on introducing velocity kicks to the particles in a way that directly connects the velocity kicks with a calculated turbulent diffusion coefficient. The validation is done by simulating both time dependent and steady state diffusive plasma flows for situations in which the plasma behavior, including a nonclassical diffusion coefficient, can be calculated analytically, so that the simulation results and analytic results can be compared and shown to be identical.