A Spectral Symplectic Algorithm for Cylindrical Electromagnetic Plasma Simulations

Symplectic integrators for Hamiltonian systems have been quite successful for studying few-body dynamical systems. These integrators are frequently derived using a formalism built on symplectic maps. There have been recent efforts to extend the symplectic approach to plasmas, which have focused primarily on discrete Lagrangian mechanics. In this paper, we derive a a symplectic electromagnetic macroparticle algorithm using the map formalism. The resulting algorithm is designed to prevent numerical instabilities such as numerical Čerenkov, which result from incorrect dispersion relations for the fields, as well as the artificial heating of plasmas, which arise from the non-symplectic nature of conventional particle-in-cell algorithms. This is the first self-consistent electromagnetic algorithm derived using a map-based approach.