Preconditioned Krylov solvers for structure-preserving discretisations

A key consideration in the development of numerical schemes for time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) is the ability to preserve certain properties of the continuum solution, such as associated conservation laws or other geometric structures of the solution. There is a long history of the development and analysis of such structure-preserving discretisation schemes, including both proofs that standard schemes have structure-preserving properties and proposals for novel schemes that achieve both high-order accuracy and exact preservation of certain properties of the continuum differential equation. When coupled with implicit time-stepping methods, a major downside to these schemes is that their structure-preserving properties generally rely on exact solution of the (possibly nonlinear) systems of equations defining each time-step in the discrete scheme. For small systems, this is often possible (up to the accuracy of floating-point arithmetic), but it becomes impractical for the large linear systems that arise when considering typical discretisation of space-time PDEs. In this paper, we propose a modification to the standard flexible generalised minimum residual (FGMRES) iteration that enforces selected constraints on approximate numerical solutions. We demonstrate its application to both systems of conservation laws and dissipative systems

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