ECRIS'26 - the 27th International Workshop on ECR Ion Sources

Methods to reduce the computation time and memory to calculate the plasma potential in electron cyclotron resonance ion source

29 Sept 2026, 14:30

30m

Hilton San Francisco - Financial District

Contributed Oral Presentation TUC: Oral session

Speaker

Thomas Thuillier (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Description

The Debye length in an ECRIS plasma can be as low as tens of micrometers while the confining plasma chambers are tens of centimeters in extent. Resolving the Debye length when solving the Poisson equation on a mesh inside these chambers requires an extremely fine mesh density, requiring large amounts of computer memory and resulting in long solution times. Methods to reduce the mathematical problem size applicable to ECRIS are presented and discussed for the finite difference method. Specifically, a new method consisting in ordering the mesh in an enantiomorphic way is presented, leading to a matrix solving complexity reduced by a factor of two. Examples of computation gains against classical solving are presented.