Validation and benchmarking of two particle-in-cell codes for a glow discharge

Here's a PDF with the slides for my ICOPS 2017 talk entitled Validation and benchmarking of two particle-in-cell codes for a glow discharge (presentation "TH 1.1-3" in the conference program).

A follow-up comment to the talk was that "a code with known flaws is much better than a code with unknown flaws". I think that summarizes the topic of validation nicely. The purpose of validation isn't necessarily to pass with flying colors, but to learn for what cases to trust a code, and for which cases NOT to trust a code. If you find issues that are easy to fix, great! But even if you find issues that are not possible to fix immediately (or ever), validation can still be worthwhile.

The full paper can be downloaded from here.

Particle-in-cell simulation of anomalous transport in a Penning discharge

I gave two talks at the IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) this morning in Atlantic City. The first one was called Particle-in-cell simulation of anomalous transport in a Penning discharge (Carlsson, Kaganovich, Raitses, Powis, Smolyakov and Romadanov). It was the first time I used Google Slides for a talk. Worked like a charm and I'm pretty happy with it, even if I'm uncomfortable with having the source files for my slides in the Google cloud and not in a git repo of my choosing. I think ICOPS will make all talks publicly available online, but I think they expect PPT or PDF slides, hence the above link to the original version of the talk, if something gets lost in translation.