Codes – David Pfefferlé Science and Research

A simple Vlasov-Poisson Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code

I was invited to give a tutorial at the ANU-MSI Mini-course/workshop on the application of computational mathematics to plasma physics, and I thought it would be instructive to design a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code from scratch and solve the simplest possible equation describing a plasma, namely the Vlasov-Poisson system in 1D. The idea was to illustrate: how simple, efficient and robust such numerical schemes are; how complex the non-linear phase-space dynamics

Visualisation software for M3D-C1

M3D-C1 is the state-of-the-art for performing non-linear 3D resistive MHD simulations of tokamaks. I was using it to model VDE and disruptions during my postdoc at PPPL with more or less success. One really annoying thing was the lack of visualisation tools, especially for probing the 3D components of the plasma evolution. I thus developed a set of tools (Matlab package) to reconstruct the data from M3D-C1 native output (Finite

VENUS-LEVIS

The drift-kinetic code VENUS-LEVIS was designed to simulate a wide variety of physical phenomena related to fast particles in electromagnetic fields. The code uses a 4th order Runge-Kutta method to solve the single particle equations of motion, either in the guiding-centre approximation or following the full particle orbits. The formulation is independent of coordinate choice and handles 3D time-varying electromagnetic fields. The interaction with the background plasma as well as