A new charge conservation method in electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations

We developed a fast algorithm for solving the current density satisfying the continuity equation of charge in electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. In PIC simulations of the charge conservation, a particle trajectory over one time step is conventionally assumed to be a straight line. In the present new scheme we assume that a particle trajectory is a zigzag line. Compared with the Villasenor-Buneman method and Esirkepov's method, the present scheme has an advantage in computation speed without any substantial distortion of physics. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.