VISUAL AND COMPUTATIONAL PLASMA PHYSICS

This book contains MATLAB programs to demonstrate the numerical algorithms, the analytical approaches, and the physical principles. It starts with single particle, single fluid, and single wave, then the kinetic theory, the transport, the magnetohydrodynamics, and the nonlinear physics.

The book emphasizes on the numerical algorithm and the analytical asymptology to tackle problems in plasma physics, and to demonstrate the underlying physics principles by graphical visualization. Students are introduced to the multiple time and multiple space scales as they learn the basic plasma phenomena, and are requested to solve problems with either MATLAB or C++.

This book is targetting at the senior and graduate level. The emphasis of this book is to teach students to solve problems from the features and characteristics of the problem itself. It provides the students for the most important learning that is not knowing the solution, but knowing how to figure out the solution.

Contents:

• A Challenging Physics Discipline
• Tools for Analysis
• Single Particle
• Single Fluid
• Single Wave
• Analytical Chapter
• Numerical Algorithm
• Kinetic and Statistical Plasma Physics
• Plasma Transport
• Magnetohydrodynamics
• Nonlinear Topics

Readership: Students and professionals in plasma physics and computational physics.
Key Features:

• There is no comparable book. The book by Birdsall and Langdon is old and covers only one kind of particle code. This book is far superior to Tajima's Computational Plasma Physics. Steve Jardin's book does not have example computer programs
• This is the only book that has a broad range of plasmas physics computational techniques with example programs, and covers all the fundamental topics in plasma physics