High order and energy preserving discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Vlasov-Poisson system

We present a computational study for a family of discontinuous Galerkin methods for the one dimensional Vlasov-Poisson system that has been recently introduced. We introduce a slight modification of the methods to allow for feasible computations while preserving the properties of the original methods. We study numerically the verification of the theoretical and convergence analysis, discussing also the conservation properties of the schemes. The methods are validated through their application to some of the benchmarks in the simulation of plasma physics.Comment: 44 pages, 28 figure

High Order Maximum Principle Preserving Semi-Lagrangian Finite Difference WENO schemes for the Vlasov Equation

In this paper, we propose the parametrized maximum principle preserving (MPP) flux limiter, originally developed in [Z. Xu, Math. Comp., (2013), in press], to the semi- Lagrangian finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory scheme for solving the Vlasov equation. The MPP flux limiter is proved to maintain up to fourth order accuracy for the semi-Lagrangian finite difference scheme without any time step restriction. Numerical studies on the Vlasov-Poisson system demonstrate the performance of the proposed method and its ability in preserving the positivity of the probability distribution function while maintaining the high order accuracy

Energy-conserving discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Vlasov-Amp\`{e}re system

In this paper, we propose energy-conserving numerical schemes for the Vlasov-Amp\`{e}re (VA) systems. The VA system is a model used to describe the evolution of probability density function of charged particles under self consistent electric field in plasmas. It conserves many physical quantities, including the total energy which is comprised of the kinetic and electric energy. Unlike the total particle number conservation, the total energy conservation is challenging to achieve. For simulations in longer time ranges, negligence of this fact could cause unphysical results, such as plasma self heating or cooling. In this paper, we develop the first Eulerian solvers that can preserve fully discrete total energy conservation. The main components of our solvers include explicit or implicit energy-conserving temporal discretizations, an energy-conserving operator splitting for the VA equation and discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for the spatial discretizations. We validate our schemes by rigorous derivations and benchmark numerical examples such as Landau damping, two-stream instability and bump-on-tail instability

Conservative and non-conservative methods based on hermite weighted essentially-non-oscillatory reconstruction for Vlasov equations

We introduce a WENO reconstruction based on Hermite interpolation both for semi-Lagrangian and finite difference methods. This WENO reconstruction technique allows to control spurious oscillations. We develop third and fifth order methods and apply them to non-conservative semi-Lagrangian schemes and conservative finite difference methods. Our numerical results will be compared to the usual semi-Lagrangian method with cubic spline reconstruction and the classical fifth order WENO finite difference scheme. These reconstructions are observed to be less dissipative than the usual weighted essentially non- oscillatory procedure. We apply these methods to transport equations in the context of plasma physics and the numerical simulation of turbulence phenomena