Time-domain formulation of cold plasma based on mass-lumped finite elements

Abstract

Abstract. Recent advances in FDTD simulations of simple dielectrics have opened the possibility of various forms of local refinement [1]. These possibilities are based on writing FDTD as a special case of a finite element technique. We have shown [3] that these techniques can be extended to Body-Of-Revolution (BOR) FDTD which is well-suited for modelling toroidal cavities. Further extending this technique to the time-domain modelling of plasmas presents difficulties: The classical "Whitney" basis-functions (and their analogues in toroidal geometries) are insufficiently smooth to be used as "testing" functions the time-domain constitutive equations of cold plasma [2]. In this paper, we present a set of basis-functions that can be used to write time-domain cold plasma as a mass lumped finite element scheme.