Research paper on Plasma Modeling and Simulation co-authored by Prof. Bhaskar Chaudhury, DA-IICT, along with his former PhD student Dr. Miral Shah and Prof. Mainak Bandyopadhyay from IPR, Gandhinagar has been recently published in Nature Scientific Reports.
(http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45656-5)

This work carries significance in the context of neutral beam injection systems which play a crucial role in heating nuclear fusion reactors - for achieving clean renewable energy.

Using massively parallel 2D-3V Particle-In-Cell Monte Carlo Collisions (PIC-MCC) simulations and data analysis, the study systematically examined the temporal and spatial evolution of electron and ion Energy Distribution Functions (EDF) within a transverse magnetic filter field (TMF) based negative ion source . Results revealed that the electron EDF (EEDF) remains Maxwellian, while ion EDF (IEDF) gradually transitions to non-Maxwellian as measurements are taken closer to the TMF region. The study highlighted that the IEDF is more sensitive to the operational conditions compared to the EEDF, while providing valuable insights about the complex plasma dynamics in such ExB based devices.