Plasma—the electrically charged fourth state of matter—is at the heart of many important industrial processes, including those used to make computer chips and coat materials.

Simulating those plasmas can be challenging, however, because millions of math operations must be performed for thousands of points in the simulation, many times per second. Even with the world’s fastest supercomputers, scientists have struggled to create a kinetic simulation—which considers individual particles—that is detailed and fast enough to help them improve those manufacturing processes.

Now, a new method offers improved stability and efficiency for kinetic simulations of what’s known as inductively coupled plasmas. The method was implemented in a code developed as part of a private-public partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and chip equipment maker Applied Materials Inc., which is already using the tool. Researchers from the University of Alberta, PPPL and Los Alamos National Laboratory contributed to the project.