Section: New Results

Particle-in-cell simulations for highly oscillatory Vlasov-Poisson systems

Participants : Edwin Chacon Golcher, Sever Adrian Hirstoaga [correspondent] , Mathieu Lutz.

The aim of the following works is to study the dynamics of charged particles under the influence of a strong magnetic field by numerically solving in an efficient way the Vlasov-Poisson and guiding center models.

First, we work on the development of the time-stepping method introduced in [7] , [8] in two directions: improve the accuracy of the algorithm and adapt the algorithm for general configuration of magnetic field.

Second, by using appropriate data structures, we implement an efficient (from the memory access point of view) Particle-In-Cell method which enables simulations with a large number of particles. Thus, we present in [13] numerical results for classical one-dimensional Landau damping and two-dimensional Kelvin-Helmholtz test cases. The implementation also relies on a standard hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelization. Code performance is assessed by the observed speedup and attained memory bandwidth. A convergence result is also illustrated by comparing the numerical solution of a four-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson system against the one for the guiding center model.