Hannover 2020 – scientific programme

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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik

P 14: Codes and modelling

P 14.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 11, 2020, 15:25–15:40, b302

Particle in Cell Simulations for the KATRIN Experiment — •Jonas Kellerer, Christian Reiling, and KATRIN Collaboration — Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), ETP, Postfach 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe

The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment aims to determine the effective neutrino mass through spectroscopy of gaseous Tritium β-decay. Those high energy β-decay electrons ionize the surrounding gas in the source and thus create a partly ionized plasma. The exterior experimental conditions generate unconventional plasma conditions resulting in an highly magnetized, partly collisional, multi-species, non-thermal (with thermal components), bound plasma. The combination of these properties make an analytical description impossible. Thus we decided on a two folded iterative simulation approach: the slow ion physics will be covered by the newly developed Monte Carlo code KARL, which produces electron energy distributions and ion currents. These results will be used by the well tested ACRONYM Particle in Cell code to resolve the fast electron-field interactions. The derived fields are in turn used as input for the KARL code. To accommodate for the special experimental conditions we implemented curve-shaped boundaries in the conformal FDTD algorithm, following the Dey-Mittra algorithm. Hereby we took extra care on the electron-wall interactions. Supplementary we added electromagnetic background fields mimicking the use external power supplies.