An Energy Conserving Vlasov Solver That Tolerates Coarse Velocity Space Resolutions: Simulation of MMS Reconnection Events

Abstract

Vlasov solvers that operate on a phase-space grid are highly accurate but also numerically demanding. Coarse velocity space resolutions, which are unproblematic in particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, can lead to numerical heating or oscillations in standard continuum Vlasov methods. We present a new dual Vlasov solver which is based on an established positivity preserving advection scheme for the update of the distribution function and an energy conserving partial differential equation solver for the kinetic update of mean velocity and temperature. The solvers work together via moment fitting during which the maximum entropy part of the distribution function is replaced by the solution from the partial differential equation solver. This numerical scheme makes continuum Vlasov methods competitive with PIC methods concerning computational cost and enables us to model large scale reconnection in Earth's magnetosphere with a fully kinetic continuum method. The simulation results agree well with measurements by the MMS spacecraft.

arXiv comment17 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (25)

• Electron-Scale Dynamics of the Diffusion Region during Symmetric Magnetic Reconnection in Space
• A Third-Order Semi-Discrete Central Scheme for Conservation Laws and Convection-Diffusion Equations
• A positivity-preserving high-order semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin scheme for the Vlasov-Poisson equations
• Discontinuous Galerkin algorithms for fully kinetic plasmas
• Thermal disequilibration of ions and electrons by collisionless plasma turbulence
• How accurately can we measure the reconnection rate $E_M$ for the MMS diffusion region event of 2017-07-11?
• Comparison of multi-fluid moment models with Particle-in-Cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection
• A semi-Lagrangian Vlasov solver in tensor train format
• Fully kinetic versus reduced-kinetic modelling of collisionless plasma turbulence
• Kinetic Vlasov Simulations of collisionless magnetic Reconnection
• Dissipation measures in weakly-collisional plasmas
• A High-Order Relativistic Two-Fluid Electrodynamic Scheme with Consistent Reconstruction of Electromagnetic Fields and a Multidimensional Riemann Solver for Electromagnetism
• Comparison of time splitting and backsubstitution methods for integrating Vlasov's equation with magnetic fields
• The Role of Superluminal Electromagnetic Waves in Pulsar Wind Termination Shocks
• Stable interpolation with isotropic and anisotropic Gaussians using Hermite generating function
• The Reduction of Magnetic Reconnection Outflow Jets to Sub-Alfvénic Speeds
• A massively parallel semi-Lagrangian solver for the six-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson equation
• Multidimensional VlasovPoisson Simulations with High-order Monotonicity- and Positivity-preserving Schemes
• Coupled Vlasov and two-fluid codes on GPUs
• ViDA: a Vlasov-DArwin solver for plasma physics at electron scales
• Temperature gradient driven heat flux closure in fluid simulations of collisionless reconnection
• An efficient, conservative, time-implicit solver for the fully kinetic arbitrary-species 1D-2V Vlasov-Ampère system
• Noise-Induced Magnetic Field Saturation in Kinetic Simulations
• Fluid Simulations of Three-Dimensional Reconnection that Capture the Lower-Hybrid Drift Instability
• Enhanced conservation properties of Vlasov codes through coupling with conservative fluid models

Cited by in corpus (4)

• A Parallel Low-Rank Solver for the Six-Dimensional Vlasov-Maxwell Equations
• Highly efficient energy-conserving moment method for the multi-dimensional Vlasov-Maxwell system
• The muphyII Code: Multiphysics Plasma Simulation on Large HPC Systems
• Optimal Landau-type closure parameters for two-fluid simulations of plasma turbulence at kinetic scales