Conservative discontinuous Galerkin scheme of a gyro-averaged Dougherty collision operator

TL;DR

This paper introduces a conservative discontinuous Galerkin scheme for a nonlinear gyrokinetic collision operator that preserves key physical properties exactly, validated through various tests and turbulence studies.

Contribution

It presents a novel phase space discretization method for the Dougherty collision operator within gyrokinetics, ensuring conservation and entropy properties discretely.

Findings

Exact conservation of particles, momentum, and energy in simulations

Validation through relaxation tests and Landau-damping benchmarks

Effective study of 5D gyrokinetic turbulence on complex field lines

Abstract

A conservative discontinuous Galerkin scheme for a nonlinear Dougherty collision operator in full-f long-wavelength gyrokinetics is presented. Analytically this model operator has the advective-diffusive form of Fokker-Planck operators, it has a non-decreasing entropy functional, and conserves particles, momentum and energy. Discretely these conservative properties are maintained exactly as well, independent of numerical resolution. In this work the phase space discretization is performed using a novel version of the discontinuous Galerkin scheme, carefully constructed using concepts of weak equality and recovery. Discrete time advancement is carried out with an explicit time-stepping algorithm, whose stability limits we explore. The formulation and implementation within the long-wavelength gyrokinetic solver of Gkeyll are validated with relaxation tests, collisional Landau-damping benchmarks and the study of 5D gyrokinetic turbulence on helical, open field lines.