Two Cellular Automata for Plasma Computations
DAVID C. MONTGOMERY, Gary D. Doolen · Complex Systems · 1987
Plasma ap plicati on s of comp ut ational tech niques based on cellular auto mat a are inhibited by t he long-ran ge nature of elec tromagnetic forc es . On e of the most promis ing fea tures of cellu lar a utomata met hods has bee n th e parallelism that becomes possible beca use of the local natu re of th e interacti ons , lea ding (for example) to t he absence of P oisson equa t ions to be solved in fluid simulations. Because it is in t he nature of a plasma that volume forces originate with distant ch arge s and currents, finding pl asma cellular automata becomes lar gely a sea rch for tricks to circumvent this nonlocality of the forces. We describe automata for two situations whe re th is ap pears possib le: two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics (2D MHD) an d the one-dimensional electrostat ic Vlaso v-P oisson system. Insuffi cient com putational expe rience has accumulated for eit he r sys tem t o argue th at it is a serious alternative to existing methods .