Energy conserving and well-balanced discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Euler-Poisson equations in spherical symmetry

TL;DR

This paper develops high-order Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Euler-Poisson equations in spherical symmetry, achieving energy conservation, well-balancedness, and shock capturing for complex astrophysical simulations.

Contribution

The paper introduces novel high-order RK discontinuous Galerkin schemes that preserve energy and equilibrium states for spherical Euler-Poisson equations, addressing complex equilibrium and shock phenomena.

Findings

Methods achieve total energy conservation up to machine precision.

Numerical examples demonstrate shock capturing and well-balanced properties.

Applicable to astrophysical models like stellar core-collapse.

Abstract

This paper presents high-order Runge-Kutta (RK) discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Euler-Poisson equations in spherical symmetry. The scheme can preserve a general polytropic equilibrium state and achieve total energy conservation up to machine precision with carefully designed spatial and temporal discretizations. To achieve the well-balanced property, the numerical solutions are decomposed into equilibrium and fluctuation components which are treated differently in the source term approximation. One non-trivial challenge encountered in the procedure is the complexity of the equilibrium state, which is governed by the Lane-Emden equation. For total energy conservation, we present second- and third-order RK time discretization, where different source term approximations are introduced in each stage of the RK method to ensure the conservation of total energy. A carefully designed slope limiter for spherical symmetry is also introduced to eliminate oscillations near discontinuities while maintaining the well-balanced and total-energy-conserving properties. Extensive numerical examples -- including a toy model of stellar core-collapse with a phenomenological equation of state that results in core-bounce and shock formation -- are provided to demonstrate the desired properties of the proposed methods, including the well-balanced property, high-order accuracy, shock capturing capability, and total energy conservation.