Orateur
Description
In this work, we compare Empire and GAZEL simulations of the RKA (~500keV, 3–30kA, <100ns) electron beam’s propagation through a pressurized Ar gas cell. Empire is a general plasma code that can be run as a fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) problem with Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) collisions or as a hybrid problem with both fluid and PIC charged species. They collide with a background neutral fluid via fluid-fluid rate-based interactions and PIC-fluid Monte Carlo Collisions (MCC) that produce a charged fluid of low-energy secondary plasma. GAZEL is a hydrid code operating in axisymmetric geometry. In the version of the code that is used, primary and secondary electrons are described by a PIC model, while neutral atoms and ions are described via a fluid. For ionization of neutral atoms and ions, GAZEL utilizes a MCC procedure between computational electron particles and the heavy species fluid. Here we compare the beam dynamics across a range of gas cell pressures (0.01–1.0 mbar) for fully kinetic Empire and hybrid GAZEL simulations in detail. Additionally, we compare the simulated beam on target with experimental RKA results.
