Current Features and Development Roadmap

Features

1. Ability to specify several sources of particles with various properties, such as charge, mass, mean momentum, etc.
2. Choose between particle interaction model: noninteracting or electrostatic PIC.
3. Ability to specify inner regions, that absorb particles on collision and act as conductors under fixed potential. Box, cylinder and tube shapes are supported.
4. Support for specification of external electric and magnetic fields: uniform or analytical.
5. Continue interrupted execution using one of output files as starting point.

Experimental features:

6. FreeCAD plugin for visual specification of simulation setup.
7. Paraview plugin for easy visualization of simulation results.
8. Support for STEP models as inner regions: seems to work correctly, but very slow.
9. Parallelization: field solver and particle pusher are parallelized using MPI.

Plans

Regarding the physics, the current plans are

1. Simulate two-stream electron-ion instability in electron beam ion source.
2. Simulate ion cooling in EBIS.

Speaking of the code, current priorities are:

1. Drop PETSc as Poisson' solver. Implement fast algorithm for solution of Poisson equation.
2. Improve GUI: both config preparation and results visualization.
3. Implement GPU parallelization.
4. Implement support for specification of external electromagnetic fields.

More distant tasks are:

1. Ability to specify "monitors": regions where simulation is tracked more precisely.
2. Add PIC-model which takes into account magnetic fields generated by particles.
3. Implement support for multi-GPU parallel execution.
4. Add support for various particle-mesh interpolation functions.
5. Add support for ionization models.