Count Particles¶
This plugin counts the total number of macro particles associated with a species and writes them to a file for specified time steps. It is used mainly for debugging purposes. Only in case of constant particle density, where each macro particle describes the same number of real particles (weighting), conclusions on the plasma density can be drawn.
.cfg file¶
The CountParticles plugin is always complied for all species.
By specifying the perodicity of the output using the comand line argument --e_macroParticlesCount.period
(here for an electron species called e
) with picongpu, the plugin is enabled.
Setting --e_macroParticlesCount.period 100
adds the number of all electron like macro particles to the file ElectronsCount.dat for every 100th time step of the simulation.
Output¶
In the output file e_macroParticlesCount.dat
, there are three columns.
The first is the integer number of the time step.
The second is the number of macro particles as integer - useful for exact counts.
And the third is the number of macro particles in scintific floating point notation - provides better human readability.
Known Issues¶
Currently, the file e_macroParticlesCount.dat
is overwritten when restarting the simulation.
Therefore, all previously stored counts are lost.