Hierarchical sparse-grid particle-in-cell method with locally adaptive mesh refinement

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce new approximation spaces and a locally adaptive refinement strategy for the hierarchical sparse-grid PIC (HSG-PIC) method to improve the bias while preserving the noise-reduction properties of sparse-grid methods. We first propose an energy-based approximation space, which optimizes the relation between the $\mathrm{H}^1$-norm error and the number of degrees of freedom, together with a family of generalized sparse-grid spaces that continuously connects classical sparse-grid and full-grid approximations. We then develop a locally adaptive approximation strategy based on hierarchical surpluses, combined with an efficient incremental refinement algorithm that avoids solving the Galerkin problem on the complete generalized space. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed adaptive HSG-PIC method substantially improves the approximation of solutions with localized structures while maintaining the statistical advantages of sparse-grid discretizations. Compared with a standard full-grid PIC method, the adaptive approach achieves comparable or higher accuracy with a significantly reduced number of mesh nodes and particles. These results demonstrate the potential of adaptive sparse-grid PIC methods for efficient simulations of kinetic plasmas with complex solution structures.