3D - Linear magnetron discharge
A three-dimensional, linear magnetron discharge setup in Argon with perodic boundary conditions and a homogenous field distribution. This setup was used to investigate the so called 'spokes' or 'ionization wave' phaenomenon as seen in the results section.
Starting the simulation
The zip archive contains mesh and parameter files for magnetic field computation and plasma simulation. To start the magnetic field computation process e.g., with 40 CPUs, enter:
$ rvmmpi -bem 40 v0.par
The simulation domain is divided into 32 sub-quads and thus, can be executed with a maximum of 32 CPUs - or less of course. To start plasma simulation enter:
$ rvmmpi -picmc 32 v0.par
Postprocessing
There is a script included to generate cut-planes from the 3D data plots. As the script parser 'RigVM' is intalled together with the DSMC / PIC-MC software package just enter:
$ rvm ppp_v0.rvm
The script contains only five lines of code so check it out and adjust it accordant to your needs.
Results
The video below was realized with the resulting Ar+ and electron density plots. It shows a spontaniously formed plasma density aggregation moving against electron drift direction. An extensive plasma physical description of this effect is given by Anders2014.