Simulation of multi-species kinetic instabilities with the Numerical Flow Iteration

TL;DR

This paper extends the Numerical Flow Iteration method to simulate multi-species kinetic instabilities in plasmas, addressing computational challenges and enabling longer, more accurate simulations of complex plasma behaviors.

Contribution

The work introduces extensions to NuFI for non-periodic boundaries and reduces computational complexity, facilitating longer and more detailed plasma instability simulations.

Findings

Successfully extended NuFI to non-periodic boundary conditions.

Reduced computational complexity for longer simulation periods.

Demonstrated improved simulation capabilities for multi-species plasma instabilities.

Abstract

Kinetic instabilities are one of the most challenging aspects in computational plasma physics. Accurately capturing their onset and evolution requires fine resolution of the high-dimensional distribution functions of each relevant species, which quickly becomes computationally prohibitively expensive. Additionally, plasma dynamics is an inherently multi-scale phenomenon due to the vast separation of scales between heavy ions and light-weight electrons. In previous work the Numerical Flow Iteration (NuFI) was suggested as a high-fidelity alternative with reduced memory complexity making it an interesting candidate to simulate complicated kinetic instabilities. In this work we extend NuFI to non-periodic boundary conditions and demonstrate how it is possible to reduce the computational complexity to allow for longer simulation periods.