Iterative Splitting Methods for Coulomb Collisions in Plasma Simulations

Abstract

In this paper, we present splitting methods that are based on iterative schemes and applied to plasma simulations. The motivation arose of solving the Coulomb collisions, which are modeled by nonlinear stochastic differential equations. We apply Langevin equations to model the characteristics of the collisions and we obtain coupled nonlinear stochastic differential equations, which are delicate to solve. We propose well-known deterministic splitting schemes that can be extended to stochastic splitting schemes, by taking into account the stochastic behavior. The benefit decomposing the different equation parts and solve such parts individual is taken into account in the analysis of the new iterative splitting schemes. Numerical analysis and application to various Coulomb collisions in plasma applications are presented.