From johnv@nuc.Berkeley.EDU Thu Oct 7 10:51:09 2004 Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 10:50:23 -0700 (PDT) From: John Verboncoeur To: mw_beam@langmuir.Nuc.Berkeley.EDU Subject: 08-Oct plasma seminar Friday 08 Oct 2004 2:00-3:00pm 4101 Etcheverry Hall University of California-Berkeley contact: johnv@eecs.berkeley.edu seminar list: http://ptsg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~johnv/seminar.html EVOLUTION OF PLASMA SIMULATION TEXTS, PIC ESPECIALLY, FROM THE 1960'S TO NOW, FROM A FEW 100 PARTICLES TO A FEW BILLION. C. K. (Ned) Birdsall (Dept EECS, U.C. Berkeley)          Our first book grew out of discovery of virtual cathode oscillations using a planar diode with a few 100 sheet charges, run overnight on the campus mainframe computer in 1959. ["Electron Dynamics of Diode Regions", by CKB and W.B. Bridges,1966, Academic Press].  Recent (2001) PC runs by Kevin Bowers, EM, 2d3v bounded model, were with 30 million particles at 7 million/sec, a billion times faster.          Next came class notes, begun in 1972, first draft of all 4 Parts typed (and circulated) by about 1977, "Plasma Physics via Computer Simulation", finished copy due to McGraw-Hill by 1981. Finally came out in Oct. 1984. [Roger Hockney and Jim Eastwood beat us to it, with their excellent "Computer Simulation using Particles", covering many kinds of particles (1981)].The Russian version of our text (in cyrillic)came out in 1989.B&L and H&E both moved to Adam-Hilger, then IOP about 1990.Total B&L copies (incl. Russian 3000) published now close to 10,000. (about same number as plasma professionals, surprising!) IOP is  about to issue a paperback of B&L, this Fall (2004).         B&L could and should have had a second edition a decade ago, adding much new material (e.g, bounded models, MCC, OOPIC coding, many free codes, lots of applications, etc... ), plus teaching slanted toward classrooms full of PC's. PTSG was much too busy in that period to even consider such.         Now AFRL in Albuquerque is supporting a strong effort at a B&L 2nd edition, to be discussed - now yet firmed up.  Some of the machinations concerning contents will be discussed, e.g., teaching versus (or, and) reference text.        Live demonstrations possibly, of teaching models, periodic and bounded.