Numerical stability of plasma sheath

TL;DR

This paper investigates the numerical stability of classical schemes in capturing stationary plasma sheaths modeled by a bi-species Vlasov-Ampère system, focusing on boundary treatment in high-order semi-Lagrangian methods.

Contribution

It analyzes whether standard numerical schemes can preserve stationary sheath solutions with boundary conditions in a plasma model.

Findings

Classical schemes may struggle to preserve stationary solutions at the discrete level.

Boundary treatment is crucial for accurate numerical simulation of plasma sheaths.

High-order semi-Lagrangian methods require specific boundary interpolation strategies.

Abstract

We are interested in developing a numerical method for capturing stationary sheaths, that a plasma forms in contact with a metallic wall. This work is based on a bi-species (ion/electron) Vlasov-Amp{\`e}re model proposed in [3]. The main question addressed in this work is to know if classical numerical schemes can preserve stationary solutions with boundary conditions, since these solutions are not a priori conserved at the discrete level. In the context of high-order semi-Lagrangian method, due to their large stencil, interpolation near the boundary of the domain requires also a specific treatment.