Recent progress regarding the excitation of energetic-particle driven geodesic acoustic modes (EGAMs) in particle-in-cell simulations is presented in this paper. The exact dispersion relation with adiabatic electrons is derived and solved. The origin of the so-called EGAM is briefly analysed and we show that its nature changes, at least, with the safety factor. A simple expression for the GAM frequency modified in the presence of a small concentration of energetic particles is given in the fluid limit. We show that gyrokinetic simulations with Nemorb in the presence of adiabatic electrons are able to reproduce the analytic predictions. Also, different energy channels are analysed by means of dedicated energy diagnostics characterizing the wave-particle interaction. Finite Larmor radius and finite orbit width effects are studied regarding the excitation of geodesic acoustic modes, showing that these effects are likely to be negligible for sufficiently high concentration of energetic particles, but significant when approaching the threshold of excitation.
Geodesic acoustic mode driven by energetic particles with bump-on-tail distribution