A parallelized implementation of the Vlasov-Hybrid method [Nunn, 1993] is
presented. This method is a hybrid between a gridded Eulerian description and
Lagrangian meta-particles. Unlike the Particle-in-Cell method [Dawson, 1983]
which simply adds up the contribution of meta-particles, this method does a
reconstruction of the distribution function f in every time step for each
species. This interpolation method combines meta-particles with different
weights in such a way that particles with large weight do not drown out
particles that represent small contributions to the phase space density. These
core properties allow the use of a much larger range of macro factors and can
thus represent a much larger dynamic range in phase space density.
The reconstructed phase space density f is used to calculate momenta of the
distribution function such as the charge density Ο. The charge density
Ο is also used as input into a spectral solver that calculates the
self-consistent electrostatic field which is used to update the particles for
the next time-step.
Afterlive (A Fourier-based Tool in the Electrostatic limit for the Rapid
Low-noise Integration of the Vlasov Equation) is fully parallelized using MPI
and writes output using parallel HDF5. The input to the simulation is read from
a JSON description that sets the initial particle distributions as well as
domain size and discretization constraints. The implementation presented here
is intentionally limited to one spatial dimension and resolves one or three
dimensions in velocity space. Additional spatial dimensions can be added in a
straight forward way, but make runs computationally even more costly.Comment: Accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communication