Exact hierarchical algorithms for accelerating particle--mesh coupling in sparse-grid particle-in-cell methods

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two hierarchical algorithms for charge deposition and electric-field interpolation that apply to both the sparse-grid combination technique (SGCT-PIC) and hierarchical sparse-grid (HSG-PIC) particle-in-cell methods. The two algorithms are inspired by the fast multipole method (FMM) and exploit clusters of particles associated with a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of particle-populated boxes to reduce the number of particle--mesh interactions. The particle--mesh interactions are governed by piecewise-polynomial kernels, so that the associated multipole expansions are exact, requiring neither truncation nor approximation, and are valid in both near- and far-field regions, thereby eliminating the need for multipole-to-local translations. The arithmetic complexity of the charge deposition and field interpolation steps is reduced from $\O(p^d n^{d-1}N)$ to $\O(p^d(N+M))$, where $M=2^{dn}$ denotes the number of full-grid mesh nodes and is typically no larger than the particle population in the considered regime, $M\lesssim N$. Numerical experiments in two-dimensional configurations demonstrate charge-deposition speedups of $8.2\times$--$66.9\times$ for SGCT-PIC and $3.1\times$--$18.8\times$ for HSG-PIC, and field-interpolation speedups of $4.1\times$--$62.6\times$ and $4.2\times$--$13.7\times$, respectively, depending on the particle-per-cell ratio, while preserving the exact particle--mesh interactions. The speedups increase with the particle-per-cell ratio, reflecting the reduced dependence of the hierarchical algorithms on the number of particles and their increasing advantage for large particle populations.