Monte Carlo Simulation of Charged Particle Diffusion through an Ionized Gas: contributions of simultaneous multiple Collisions

When a charged particle moves through fully or partially ionized plasmas, energy loss and momentum transfer occur through various kinds of elastic and inelastic collisions. In ordinary gases, composed primarily of neutral particles, the interactions are mainly close binary collisions, being the impact parameter well shorter than the mean free path. In a gas composed of charged particles, neglecting simultaneous multiple collisions can be a very poor approximation because the electromagnetic forces decrease much more slowly with distance than do the forces between neutral atoms. Here we present a Monte Carlo code, where the effects of large impact parameter multiple scattering are considered.