A discontinuous Galerkin method for the Vlasov-Poisson system

A discontinuous Galerkin method for approximating the Vlasov-Poisson system of equations describing the time evolution of a collisionless plasma is proposed. The method is mass conservative and, in the case that piecewise constant functions are used as a basis, the method preserves the positivity of the electron distribution function and weakly enforces continuity of the electric field through mesh interfaces and boundary conditions. The performance of the method is investigated by computing several examples and error estimates associated system's approximation are stated. In particular, computed results are benchmarked against established theoretical results for linear advection and the phenomenon of linear Landau damping for both the Maxwell and Lorentz distributions. Moreover, two nonlinear problems are considered: nonlinear Landau damping and a version of the two-stream instability are computed. For the latter, fine scale details of the resulting long-time BGK-like state are presented. Conservation laws are examined and various comparisons to theory are made. The results obtained demonstrate that the discontinuous Galerkin method is a viable option for integrating the Vlasov-Poisson system.Comment: To appear in Journal for Computational Physics, 2011. 63 pages, 86 figure

Long time simulation of a highly oscillatory Vlasov equation with an exponential integrator

We change a previous time-stepping algorithm for solving a multi-scale Vlasov-Poisson system within a Particle-In-Cell method, in order to do accurate long time simulations. As an exponential integrator, the new scheme allows to use large time steps compared to the size of oscillations in the solution

A dynamical adaptive tensor method for the Vlasov-Poisson system

A numerical method is proposed to solve the full-Eulerian time-dependent Vlasov-Poisson system in high dimension. The algorithm relies on the construction of a tensor decomposition of the solution whose rank is adapted at each time step. This decomposition is obtained through the use of an efficient modified Progressive Generalized Decomposition (PGD) method, whose convergence is proved. We suggest in addition a symplectic time-discretization splitting scheme that preserves the Hamiltonian properties of the system. This scheme is naturally obtained by considering the tensor structure of the approximation. The efficiency of our approach is illustrated through time-dependent 2D-2D numerical examples

Long time simulation of a beam in a periodic focusing channel via a two-scale PIC-method

We study the two-scale asymptotics for a charged beam under the action of a rapidly oscillating external electric field. After proving the convergence to the correct asymptotic state, we develop a numerical method for solving the limit model involving two time scales and validate its efficiency for the simulation of long time beam evolution

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