Relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell modelling using finite volumes and adaptive mesh refinement

Abstract

The dynamics of collisionless plasmas can be modelled by the Vlasov-Maxwell system of equations. An Eulerian approach is needed to accurately describe processes that are governed by high energy tails in the distribution function, but is of limited efficiency for high dimensional problems. The use of an adaptive mesh can reduce the scaling of the computational cost with the dimension of the problem. Here, we present a relativistic Eulerian Vlasov-Maxwell solver with block-structured adaptive mesh refinement in one spatial and one momentum dimension. The discretization of the Vlasov equation is based on a high-order finite volume method. A flux corrected transport algorithm is applied to limit spurious oscillations and ensure the physical character of the distribution function. We demonstrate a speed-up by a factor of 7x in a typical scenario involving laser-plasma interaction with an underdense plasma due to the use of an adaptive mesh.

14 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (5)

• Radiation Pressure Acceleration of Thin Foils with Circularly Polarized Laser Pulses
• Hole boring in a DT pellet and fast ion ignition with ultra-intense laser pulses
• Effect of electron heating on self-induced transparency in relativistic intensity laser-plasma interaction
• Vlasov simulation of laser-driven shock acceleration and ion turbulence
• Vlasov modelling of laser-driven collisionless shock acceleration of protons

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Vlasov methods in space physics and astrophysics
• Discontinuous Galerkin algorithms for fully kinetic plasmas
• A low-rank projector-splitting integrator for the Vlasov--Maxwell equations with divergence correction
• A comparison of semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin and spline based Vlasov solvers in four dimensions