An Envelope Tracking Approach for Particle in Cell Simulations

—The state of the art in electromagnetic Finite Ele- ment Particle-in-Cell (EM-FEMPIC) has advanced significantly in the last few years; these have included understanding function spaces that must be used to represent sources and fields consistently, and how currents should be evolved in space and time. In concert, these achieve satisfaction of Gauss’ laws. All of these, were restricted to conditionally stable explicit time stepping. More recently, there has been advances to the state of art: It is now possible to use a implicit EM-FEMPIC method while satisfying Gauss’ law to machine precision. This enables choosing time step sizes dictated by physics as opposed to geometry. In this paper, we take this a step further. For devices characterized by a narrowband high frequency response, choosing a time-step size based on the highest frequency of interest is considerably expensive. In this paper, we use methods derived from envelope tracking to construct an EM-FEMPIC method that analytically provides for the high-frequency oscillations of the system, allow- ing for analysis at considerable coarser time-step sizes even in the presence of non-linear effects from active media such as plasmas. Consequentially, we demonstrate how the pointwise metric used for measuring satisfaction of Gauss’ Laws breaks down when prescribing analytical fast fields and provide a thorough analysis of how charge conservation can be measured. Through a number of examples, we demonstrate that the proposed approach retains the accuracy the regular scheme while requiring far fewer time steps.