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Section: Research Program

Electromagnetic solvers

A precise resolution of the electromagnetic fields is essential for proper plasma simulation. Thus it is important to use efficient solvers for the Maxwell systems and its asymptotics: Poisson equation and magnetostatics.

The proper coupling of the electromagnetic solver with the Vlasov solver is also crucial for ensuring conservation properties and stability of the simulation.

Finally plasma physics implies very different time scales. It is thus very important to develop implicit Maxwell solvers and Asymptotic Preserving (AP) schemes in order to obtain good behavior on long time scales.

Coupling

The coupling of the Maxwell equations to the Vlasov solver requires some precautions. The most important is to control the charge conservation errors, which are related to the divergence conditions on the electric and magnetic fields. We will generally use divergence correction tools for hyperbolic systems presented for instance in [15] (and included references).

Implicit solvers

As already pointed out, in a tokamak, the plasma presents several different space and time scales. It is not possible in practice to solve the initial Vlasov-Maxwell model. It is first necessary to establish asymptotic models by letting some parameters (such as the Larmor frequency or the speed of light) tend to infinity. This is the case for the electromagnetic solver and this requires implementing implicit time solvers in order to efficiently capture the stationary state, the solution of the magnetic induction equation or the Poisson equation.