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

GEMPIC: Geometric ElectroMagnetic Particle-In-Cell Methods

We present a novel framework for Finite Element Particle-in-Cell methods based on the discretization of the underlying Hamiltonian structure of the Vlasov-Maxwell system. We derive a semi-discrete Poisson bracket, which retains the defining properties of a bracket, anti-symmetry and the Jacobi identity, as well as conservation of its Casimir invariants, implying that the semi-discrete system is still a Hamiltonian system. In order to obtain a fully discrete Poisson integrator, the semi-discrete bracket is used in conjunction with Hamiltonian splitting methods for integration in time. Techniques from Finite Element Exterior Calculus ensure conservation of the divergence of the magnetic field and Gauss' law as well as stability of the field solver. The resulting methods are gauge invariant, feature exact charge conservation and show excellent long-time energy and momentum behaviour. Due to the generality of our framework, these conservation properties are guaranteed independently of a particular choice of the Finite Element basis, as long as the corresponding Finite Element spaces satisfy certain compatibility conditions.Comment: 57 Page

Metriplectic Integrators for the Landau Collision Operator

We present a novel framework for addressing the nonlinear Landau collision integral in terms of finite element and other subspace projection methods. We employ the underlying metriplectic structure of the Landau collision integral and, using a Galerkin discretization for the velocity space, we transform the infinite-dimensional system into a finite-dimensional, time-continuous metriplectic system. Temporal discretization is accomplished using the concept of discrete gradients. The conservation of energy, momentum, and particle densities, as well as the production of entropy is demonstrated algebraically for the fully discrete system. Due to the generality of our approach, the conservation properties and the monotonic behavior of entropy are guaranteed for finite element discretizations in general, independently of the mesh configuration.Comment: 24 pages. Comments welcom

Handling the divergence constraints in Maxwell and Vlasov-Maxwell simulations

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to review and classify the different methods that have been developed to enable stable long time simulations of the Vlasov-Maxwell equations and the Maxwell equations with sources. These methods can be classified in two types: field correction methods and sources correction methods. The field correction methods introduce new unknowns in the equations, for which additional boundary conditions are in some cases non trivial to find. The source correction consists in computing the sources so that they satisfy a discrete continuity equation compatible with a discrete Gauss' law that needs to be defined in accordance with the discretization of the Maxwell propagation operator