Computational Analysis of Plasma Evolution during High Power Millimeter Wave Breakdown using Mesh Refinement based Fluid Simulations

Abstract

The complex plasma dynamics associated with high power high frequency EM wave breakdown at high pressures leading to formation of complex plasma structures such as selforganized plasma arrays is a subject of great interest from scientific point of view as well as its numerous applications. The widely used fluid-based simulation of this multi-physics multiscale phenomena is a computationally intensive problem due to stringent numerical requirements in terms of cell size and time step. In this paper, we present a mesh refinement (MR) based algorithm that efficiently discretizes the computational domain in terms of coarse and fine mesh based on specific predefined criteria to resolve the sharp gradients in E-fields and plasma density. We find that the serial as well as the parallel MR technique presented in this paper helps us to obtain significant speedup (2-80 times) compared to a serial implementation with uniform mesh without any crucial compromise in accuracy. We also present a unique spatio-temporal analysis to explain the complex physics of HPM breakdown.