Discrete hypocoercive estimates for discontinuous Galerkin methods: application to the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system

TL;DR

This paper introduces structure-preserving discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system, demonstrating exponential relaxation to equilibrium and invariant preservation through discrete hypocoercivity analysis.

Contribution

It develops a novel class of DG schemes that are structure-preserving and proves their exponential relaxation to equilibrium uniformly with respect to discretization.

Findings

Schemes preserve physical invariants and L2 structure.

Proved exponential relaxation to equilibrium.

Numerical simulations confirm accuracy and long-time behavior.

Abstract

We develop and analyze a class of structure-preserving discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck model, reformulated as a hyperbolic system through a Hermite expansion in the velocity variable. We discretize the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation with the discontinuous Galerkin method, while the Poisson equation is approximated with either a discontinuous Galerkin method or a Raviart-Thomas mixed finite element method. We prove the exponential relaxation to equilibrium for suitable initial data, uniformly with respect to the discretization parameters thanks to discrete hypocoercivity arguments. Moreover, we check that the resulting semi-discrete schemes preserve the physical invariants along with the L 2 variational structure of the linearized model. Numerical simulations verify the accuracy and the long-time behavior of the scheme.