Numerical thermalization time scaling of 2D electromagnetic collisional plasmas

Numerical thermalization is a numerical artifact in Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations which cannot be ignored as the transition of the velocity distribution towards a Maxwellian type varies with the number of particles per Debye length for collisionless plasma1. It has been recently identified that the thermalization time is greatly reduced with the inclusion of collisions for one-dimensional (1D) electrostatic collisional plasmas2. For 1D collisional plasma, the thermalization time scales with Nd (ν0/ωpe)−1, where ND is the number of particles per Debye length, υ0 is the collision frequency and ωpe is the plasma frequency.