  Particle-in-Cell (PIC) methods are widely used computational tools for fluid
and kinetic plasma modeling. While both the fluid and kinetic PIC approaches
have been successfully used to target either kinetic or fluid simulations,
little was done to combine fluid and kinetic particles under the same PIC
framework. This work addresses this issue by proposing a new PIC method,
PolyPIC, that uses polymorphic computational particles. In this numerical
scheme, particles can be either kinetic or fluid, and fluid particles can
become kinetic when necessary, e.g. particles undergoing a strong acceleration.
We design and implement the PolyPIC method, and test it against the Landau
damping of Langmuir and ion acoustic waves, two stream instability and sheath
formation. We unify the fluid and kinetic PIC methods under one common
framework comprising both fluid and kinetic particles, providing a tool for
adaptive fluid-kinetic coupling in plasma simulations.
