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Exploring exponential time integration for strongly magnetized charged particle motion

A fundamental task in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of plasma physics is solving for charged particle motion in electromagnetic fields. This problem is especially challenging when the plasma is strongly magnetized due to numerical stiffness arising from the wide separation in time scales between highly oscillatory gyromotion and overall macroscopic behavior of the system. In contrast to conventional finite difference schemes, we investigated exponential integration techniques to numerically simulate strongly magnetized charged particle motion. Numerical experiments with a uniform magnetic field show that exponential integrators yield superior performance for linear problems (i.e. configurations with an electric field given by a quadratic electric scalar potential) and are competitive with conventional methods for nonlinear problems with cubic and quartic electric scalar potentials.