Convergence analysis of a Crank-Nicolson scheme for strongly magnetized plasmas

Abstract

The present paper is devoted to the convergence analysis of an asymptotic preserving particle scheme designed to serve as a particle pusher in a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method for the Vlasov equation with a strong inhomogeneous magnetic field. The asymptotic preserving scheme that we study removes classical strong restrictive stability constraints on discretization steps while capturing the large-scale dynamics, even when the discretization is too coarse to capture fastest scales. Our error bounds are explicit regarding the discretization and stiffness parameters and match sharply numerical tests. The present analysis is expected to be representative of the general analysis of a class of schemes, developed by the authors, conceived as implicit-explicit schemes on augmented formulations.