Impact of dissipative effects on the macroscopic evolution of a Vlasov system

Abstract

Numerical diffusion is introduced by any numerical scheme as soon as small scales fluctuations, generated during the dynamical evolution of a collisionless plasma, become comparable to the grid size. Here we investigate the role of numerical dissipation in collisionless plasma simulations by studying the non linear regime of the two stream instability. We show that the long time evolution of the Vlasov - Poisson system can be affected by the used algorithm.