MiniPIC.jl

A minimal 1D electrostatic Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulation package for Julia.

Features

• Vlasov-Poisson solver for collisionless plasma simulations
• Leapfrog integration for symplectic time-stepping
• Linear shape functions for charge deposition and field interpolation
• Periodic boundary conditions
• Two PIC schemes: MC-PIC (momentum-conserving) and EC-PIC (energy-conserving)
• Multi-threaded particle operations using Polyester.jl

Installation

using Pkg
Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/OttTs/MiniPIC.jl")

Quick Start

using MiniPIC

# Initialize particles
Nₚ = 10000
L = 2π
x = rand(Nₚ) * L      # Uniform positions
v = randn(Nₚ)         # Maxwellian velocities

# Set up simulation parameters
p = Parameters(
    mesh_length = L,
    num_cells = 64,
    time_step = 0.1,
    num_steps = 200,
    charge = -1.0,
    mass = 1.0,
    weighting = L / Nₚ,
    permittivity = 1.0
)

# Run simulation
simulate!(x, v; parameters=p, file_name="simulation")

Output

The simulation produces two output files:

• simulation.csv — Time series of kinetic and potential energy
• simulation.jld2 — Particle data and parameters (HDF5-compatible)

Read results with:

using CSV, DataFrames
df = CSV.read("simulation.csv", DataFrame)

# Read particle data at specific simulation step
x_final, v_final = read_particles("simulation", 200)

Documentation

For more details on the physical model and numerical methods, see the documentation.

License

MIT License