A renormalization group approach to particle-in-cell weighting for dense plasmas

This paper reports on the development of a heuristic renormalization method that rescales the bare electron charge assuming the existence of a screening cloud of dense plasma in a manner identical to the formation of the Debye sheath. This renormalization is used to provide an interpretation of the standard particle-in-cell (PIC) weighting of particle information to the grid. This provides a natural scheme to interpret grid heating, and offers a means to systematically increase the accuracy of the particle weighting based on local information, such as plasma density and co-located grid resolution, to achieve desired fidelity. The new technique offers the potential of progressively higher order particle methods at reasonable computational costs.