Seminar Scientific Computing (Katharina Kormann)

The Vlasov describes the evolution of a plasma in its self-consistent and external electro-magnetic fields. In this talk, we will discuss structure-preserving discretizations for the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system.

We will first discuss a particle-in-cell method based on a finite element exterior calculus discretization of the fields and a particle discretization of the distribution function in phase space. We derive the semi-discrete equations of motion form a semi-discrete action principle. For the time-discretization we derive a (almost) energy-conserving semi-implicit method based on a discrete gradient discretization.

Moreover, we discuss how to derive structure-preserving moment models and show first results for a cold plasma model.