A Legendre-Fourier spectral method with exact conservation laws for the Vlasov-Poisson system

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Legendre-Fourier spectral method for the Vlasov-Poisson system that guarantees exact conservation of key physical quantities and ensures L2 stability, demonstrated through numerical tests.

Contribution

The paper develops a novel spectral discretization combining Legendre and Fourier bases that preserves conservation laws exactly and maintains stability for plasma simulations.

Findings

Exact conservation of mass, momentum, and energy in the semi-discrete and discrete models.

L2-stability achieved through boundary penalty terms without compromising conservation.

Numerical tests confirm the method's effectiveness and stability.

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of an L2-stable spectral method for the discretization of the Vlasov- Poisson model of a collisionless plasma in one space and velocity dimension. The velocity and space dependence of the Vlasov equation are resolved through a truncated spectral expansion based on Legendre and Fourier basis functions, respectively. The Poisson equation, which is coupled to the Vlasov equation, is also resolved through a Fourier expansion. The resulting system of ordinary differential equation is discretized by the implicit second-order accurate Crank-Nicolson time discretization. The non-linear dependence between the Vlasov and Poisson equations is iteratively solved at any time cycle by a Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov method. In this work we analyze the structure of the main conservation laws of the resulting Legendre-Fourier model, e.g., mass, momentum, and energy, and prove that they are exactly satisfied in the semi-discrete and discrete setting. The L2-stability of the method is ensured by discretizing the boundary conditions of the distribution function at the boundaries of the velocity domain by a suitable penalty term. The impact of the penalty term on the conservation properties is investigated theoretically and numerically. An implementation of the penalty term that does not affect the conservation of mass, momentum and energy, is also proposed and studied. A collisional term is introduced in the discrete model to control the filamentation effect, but does not affect the conservation properties of the system. Numerical results on a set of standard test problems illustrate the performance of the method.