A numerical solver for investigating the space charge effect on theelectric field in liquid argon time projection chambers

This paper reports the development of a numerical solver aimed to simulate the interactionbetween the space charge (i.e. ions) distribution and the electric field in liquid argon timeprojection chamber (LArTPC) detectors. The ion transport equation is solved by a time-accurate,cell-centered finite v...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of instrumentation 2023-06, Vol.18 (6), p.P06022
Main Authors: Tu, Shuang Z, Jiang, Chao, Junk, Thomas R, Yang, Tingjun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Argon
Charge distribution
Computational fluid dynamics
Electric fields
Electric potential
Finite volume method
Flow velocity
Ion transport
Ions
Message passing
Radiation counters
Solvers
Space charge
Transport equations
Velocity distribution
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Summary:This paper reports the development of a numerical solver aimed to simulate the interactionbetween the space charge (i.e. ions) distribution and the electric field in liquid argon timeprojection chamber (LArTPC) detectors. The ion transport equation is solved by a time-accurate,cell-centered finite volume method and the electric potential equation by a continuous finiteelement method. The electric potential equation updates the electric field which provides thedrift velocity to the ion transport equation. The ion transport equation updates the space chargedensity distribution which appears as the source term in the electric potential equation. Theinteraction between the space charge distribution and the electric field is numerically simulatedwithin each physical time step. The convective velocity in the ion transport equation can includethe background flow velocity in addition to the electric drift velocity. The numerical solver hasbeen parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. Numerical tests show andverify the capability and accuracy of the current numerical solver. It is planned that thedeveloped numerical solver, together with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package whichprovides the flow velocity field, can be used to investigate the space charge effect on theelectric field in large-scale particle detectors.
ISSN:1748-0221
DOI:10.1088/1748-0221/18/06/P06022