Multispecies structure-preserving particle discretization of the Landau collision operator

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel numerical integrator for modeling multispecies Coulomb collisions in kinetic plasmas. The proposed scheme provides an energy-, momentum-, and positivity-preserving particle discretization of the nonlinear Landau collision operator, extending the works of J.A. Carrillo et al., Journal of Computational Physics, 7, 100066 (2020) and E. Hirvijoki, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 63, 044003 (2021). The discrete-time conservation properties are analyzed both algebraically and numerically, and an efficient, GPU-parallelized implementation is validated against inhomogeneous temperature relaxation, isotropization and thermalization examples. The results agree with analytical estimates, confirming the method capable of reproducing physics.