A three-dimensional numerical method for modelling weakly ionized plasmas

Abstract

Astrophysical fluids under the influence of magnetic fields are often subjected to single-fluid or two-fluid approximations. In the case of weakly ionized plasmas however, this can be inappropriate due to distinct responses from the multiple constituent species to both collisional and non-collisional forces. As a result, in dense molecular clouds and proto-stellar accretion discs for instance, the conductivity of the plasma may be highly anisotropic leading to phenomena such as Hall and ambipolar diffusion strongly influencing the dynamics. Diffusive processes are known to restrict the stability of conventional numerical schemes which are not implicit in nature. Furthermore, recent work establishes that a large Hall term can impose an additional severe stability limit on standard explicit schemes. Following a previous paper which presented the one-dimensional case, we describe a fully three-dimensional method which relaxes the normal restrictions on explicit schemes for multifluid processes. This is achieved by applying the little known Super TimeStepping technique to the symmetric (ambipolar) component of the evolution operator for the magnetic field in the local plasma rest-frame, and the new Hall Diffusion Scheme to the skew-symmetric (Hall) component.