Plasma modeling

The single-particle model describes the plasma as individual electrons and ions moving in imposed (rather than self-consistent) electric and magnetic fields.

The kinetic model is the most fundamental way to describe a plasma, resultantly producing a distribution function where the independent variables

The charges and currents produced by the distribution functions self-consistently determine the electromagnetic fields via Maxwell's equations.

The hybrid model is sometimes applied in space physics, when the simulation domain exceeds thousands of ion gyroradius scales, making it impractical to solve kinetic equations for electrons.

[1] [2] In the gyrokinetic model, which is appropriate to systems with a strong background magnetic field, the kinetic equations are averaged over the fast circular motion of the gyroradius.

This model has been used extensively for simulation of tokamak plasma instabilities (for example, the GYRO and Gyrokinetic ElectroMagnetic codes), and more recently in astrophysical applications.

Particles that move, or are removed from the population push and pull on this web of forces, this field.

However, this holds only if densities are high enough for an excited hydrogen atom to undergo many collisions such that the energy is distributed before the radiative process sets in.