High Fidelity simulations of the multi-species Vlasov equation in the electro-static, collisional-less limit

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-fidelity numerical approach, NuFI, for solving the multi-species Vlasov equation in plasma physics, aiming to improve accuracy over traditional methods like PIC in predicting kinetic instabilities.

Contribution

The paper introduces the Numerical Flow Iteration (NuFI) method as a novel high-fidelity technique for solving the multi-species Vlasov equation in plasma simulations.

Findings

NuFI achieves higher accuracy than PIC methods.

NuFI effectively captures fine structures in plasma distribution functions.

The approach reduces computational costs compared to high-resolution grid methods.

Abstract

The accurate prediction of occurrence and strength of kinetic instabilities in plasmas remains a significant challenge in nuclear fusion research. To accurately capture the plasmas dynamics one is required to solve the Vlasov equation for several species which, however, comes with a number of challenges as high dimensionality of the model as well as turbulence and development of fine but relevant structures in the distribution function. The predominantly employed Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method often lacks the accuracy to resolve the dynamics correctly, which can only be remedied by going to higher resolutions but at a prohibitorily high cost due to the high-dimensionality. Thus in this work we discuss the usage of the Numerical Flow Iteration (NuFI) as high fidelity approach, in contrast to e.g. PIC or grid-based approaches, to solve the multi-species Vlasov equation in modes leading to kinetic instabilities.