2D Arc-PIC Code Description: Methods and Documentation

Vacuum discharges are one of the main limiting factors for future linear collider designs such as that of the Compact Linear Collider. To optimise machine efficiency, maintaining the highest feasible accelerating gradient below a certain breakdown rate is desirable; understanding breakdowns can therefore help us to achieve this goal. As a part of ongoing theoretical research on vacuum discharges at the Helsinki Institute of Physics, the build-up of plasma can be investigated through the particle-in-cell method. For this purpose, we have developed the 2D Arc-PIC code introduced here. We present an exhaustive description of the 2D Arc-PIC code in two parts. In the first part, we introduce the particle-in-cell method in general and detail the techniques used in the code. In the second part, we provide a documentation and derivation of the key equations occurring in the code.