Vlasov equation and NN-body dynamics - How central is particle dynamics to our understanding of plasmas?

Difficulties in founding microscopically the Vlasov equation for Coulomb-interacting particles are recalled for both the statistical approach (BBGKY hierarchy and Liouville equation on phase space) and the dynamical approach (single empirical measure on one-particle $(\mathbf{r},\mathbf{v})$-space). The role of particle trajectories (characteristics) in the analysis of the partial differential Vlasov--Poisson system is stressed. Starting from many-body dynamics, a direct derivation of both Debye shielding and collective behaviour is sketched.Comment: revTeX, 15 p

The Kinetic and Hydrodynamic Bohm Criterions for Plasma Sheath Formation

The purpose of this paper is to mathematically investigate the formation of a plasma sheath, and to analyze the Bohm criterions which are required for the formation. Bohm derived originally the (hydrodynamic) Bohm criterion from the Euler--Poisson system. Boyd and Thompson proposed the (kinetic) Bohm criterion from kinetic point of view, and then Riemann derived it from the Vlasov--Poisson system. In this paper, we prove the solvability of boundary value problems of the Vlasov--Poisson system. On the process, we see that the kinetic Bohm criterion is a necessary condition for the solvability. The argument gives a simpler derivation of the criterion. Furthermore, the hydrodynamic criterion can be derived from the kinetic criterion. It is of great interest to find the relation between the solutions of the Vlasov--Poisson and Euler--Poisson systems. To clarify the relation, we also study the hydrodynamic limit of solutions of the Vlasov--Poisson system.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figure

Weakly collisional Landau damping and three-dimensional Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal modes: New results on old problems

Landau damping and Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) modes are among the most fundamental concepts in plasma physics. While the former describes the surprising damping of linear plasma waves in a collisionless plasma, the latter describes exact undamped nonlinear solutions of the Vlasov equation. There does exist a relationship between the two: Landau damping can be described as the phase-mixing of undamped eigenmodes, the so-called Case-Van Kampen modes, which can be viewed as BGK modes in the linear limit. While these concepts have been around for a long time, unexpected new results are still being discovered. For Landau damping, we show that the textbook picture of phase-mixing is altered profoundly in the presence of collision. In particular, the continuous spectrum of Case-Van Kampen modes is eliminated and replaced by a discrete spectrum, even in the limit of zero collision. Furthermore, we show that these discrete eigenmodes form a complete set of solutions. Landau-damped solutions are then recovered as true eigenmodes (which they are not in the collisionless theory). For BGK modes, our interest is motivated by recent discoveries of electrostatic solitary waves in magnetospheric plasmas. While one-dimensional BGK theory is quite mature, there appear to be no exact three-dimensional solutions in the literature (except for the limiting case when the magnetic field is sufficiently strong so that one can apply the guiding-center approximation). We show, in fact, that two- and three-dimensional solutions that depend only on energy do not exist. However, if solutions depend on both energy and angular momentum, we can construct exact three-dimensional solutions for the unmagnetized case, and two-dimensional solutions for the case with a finite magnetic field. The latter are shown to be exact, fully electromagnetic solutions of the steady-state Vlasov-Poisson-Amp\`ere system

Wigner-Poisson and nonlocal drift-diffusion model equations for semiconductor superlattices

A Wigner-Poisson kinetic equation describing charge transport in doped semiconductor superlattices is proposed. Electrons are supposed to occupy the lowest miniband, exchange of lateral momentum is ignored and the electron-electron interaction is treated in the Hartree approximation. There are elastic collisions with impurities and inelastic collisions with phonons, imperfections, etc. The latter are described by a modified BGK (Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook) collision model that allows for energy dissipation while yielding charge continuity. In the hyperbolic limit, nonlocal drift-diffusion equations are derived systematically from the kinetic Wigner-Poisson-BGK system by means of the Chapman-Enskog method. The nonlocality of the original quantum kinetic model equations implies that the derived drift-diffusion equations contain spatial averages over one or more superlattice periods. Numerical solutions of the latter equations show self-sustained oscillations of the current through a voltage biased superlattice, in agreement with known experiments.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure, published as M3AS 15, 1253 (2005) with correction

Contributions of plasma physics to chaos and nonlinear dynamics

This topical review focusses on the contributions of plasma physics to chaos and nonlinear dynamics bringing new methods which are or can be used in other scientific domains. It starts with the development of the theory of Hamiltonian chaos, and then deals with order or quasi order, for instance adiabatic and soliton theories. It ends with a shorter account of dissipative and high dimensional Hamiltonian dynamics, and of quantum chaos. Most of these contributions are a spin-off of the research on thermonuclear fusion by magnetic confinement, which started in the fifties. Their presentation is both exhaustive and compact. [15 April 2016

A High Order Stochastic Asymptotic Preserving Scheme for Chemotaxis Kinetic Models with Random Inputs

In this paper, we develop a stochastic Asymptotic-Preserving (sAP) scheme for the kinetic chemotaxis system with random inputs, which will converge to the modified Keller-Segel model with random inputs in the diffusive regime. Based on the generalized Polynomial Chaos (gPC) approach, we design a high order stochastic Galerkin method using implicit-explicit (IMEX) Runge-Kutta (RK) time discretization with a macroscopic penalty term. The new schemes improve the parabolic CFL condition to a hyperbolic type when the mean free path is small, which shows significant efficiency especially in uncertainty quantification (UQ) with multi-scale problems. The stochastic Asymptotic-Preserving property will be shown asymptotically and verified numerically in several tests. Many other numerical tests are conducted to explore the effect of the randomness in the kinetic system, in the aim of providing more intuitions for the theoretic study of the chemotaxis models