High Fidelity simulations of the multi-species Vlasov equation in the electro-static, collisional-less limit

Abstract

The accurate prediction of occurrence and strength of kinetic instabilities in plasmas remains a significant challenge in nuclear fusion research. To accurately capture the plasmas dynamics one is required to solve the Vlasov equation for several species which, however, comes with a number of challenges as high dimensionality of the model as well as turbulence and development of fine but relevant structures in the distribution function. The predominantly employed Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method often lacks the accuracy to resolve the dynamics correctly, which can only be remedied by going to higher resolutions but at a prohibitorily high cost due to the high-dimensionality. Thus in this work we discuss the usage of the Numerical Flow Iteration (NuFI) as high fidelity approach, in contrast to e.g. PIC or grid-based approaches, to solve the multi-species Vlasov equation in modes leading to kinetic instabilities.