GPU Accelerated Direct Kinetic Simulation Code for Collisionless Plasma Expansion

Collisionless plasma expansion is a fundamental physics problem in plasma science and has great impacts on engineering applications, such as fusion and electric propulsion. Though much more computationally expensive, the kinetic approaches are required for both electrons and ions in order to accurately solve the collisionless plasma problems. The gridbased direct kinetic simulation code with GPU acceleration is developed. We take advantage of this GPU accelerated direct kinetic code to study the Vlasov equation with 1D1V, 2D2V and 2D3V. The simulation results can be used to analyse the non-equilibrium effects on collisionless plasma expansions as well as to study the validity of numerous simplified models in the literatures. Keywords-collisionless plasma expansion; direct kinetic method; GPU