Study of a fully implicit scheme for the drift-diffusion system. Asymptotic behavior in the quasi-neutral limit
For computational scientists simulating plasma or semiconductor devices, this work provides a numerical scheme that remains stable and accurate in the challenging quasi-neutral regime.
The paper proves that a fully implicit finite volume scheme with Scharfetter-Gummel fluxes for the drift-diffusion system is asymptotic preserving in the quasi-neutral limit, meaning its a priori estimates are uniform with respect to the Debye length.
In this paper, we are interested in the numerical approximation of the classical time-dependent drift-diffusion system near quasi-neutrality. We consider a fully implicit in time and finite volume in space scheme, where the convection-diffusion fluxes are approximated by Scharfetter-Gummel fluxes. We establish that all the a priori estimates needed to prove the convergence of the scheme does not depend on the Debye length $λ$. This proves that the scheme is asymptotic preserving in the quasi-neutral limit $λ\to 0$.