A semi-implicit Hall-MHD solver using whistler wave preconditioning

The dispersive character of the Hall-MHD solutions, in particular the whistler waves, is a strong restriction to numerical treatments of this system. Numerical stability demands a time step dependence of the form Δt∝(Δx)2Δt∝(Δx)2 for explicit calculations. A new semi-implicit scheme for integrating the induction equation is proposed and applied to a reconnection problem. It is based on a fix point iteration with a physically motivated preconditioning. Due to its convergence properties, short wavelengths converge faster than long ones, thus it can be used as a smoother in a nonlinear multigrid method.