A binary collision Monte Carlo model for temperature relaxation in multicomponent plasmas

Abstract

Particle simulations with Monte Carlo collision models have been widely used to efficiently solve Coulomb collisions in plasma systems. A binary collision Monte Carlo model which has been proposed previously provides more accurate results than the commonly used Nanbu’s model for electron-ion temperature relaxation. In the present work, this binary model is generalized to simulate multicomponent plasmas, and its results still show higher accuracy than Nanbu’s model when compared to the baseline results obtained from Particle-Particle simulations. In addition, the binary model is improved to eliminate the time step length limitation occurred in the previous algorithm.