Eur. Phys. J. D 54, 409-415 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2009-00075-y

Simulations of single charged particle motion in external magnetic and electric fields

¹ University of Ljubljana, LECAD Laboratory, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
² Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1730, USA
³ Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Corresponding author: ^a erzen.david@gmail.com

Received: 15 September 2008
Revised: 24 January 2009
Published online: 13 March 2009

Abstract

In this paper we present a software package for computational modeling of single particle motion in static and dynamic external magnetic and electric fields and show applications of our package to general cases and particular cases of space, laboratory and fusion plasmas. In addition we further elaborate on the properties of a new concept named Larmor Center Trajectory that we introduced in our previous work [D. Erzen, J.P. Verboncoeur, J. Duhovnik, N. Jeli, Int. J. Multiphys. 1, 419 (2007)] as a generalization of the well known guiding center approximation, and show the ranges of applicability of this concept, especially in strongly inhomogeneous fields when adiabatic approximations break.