Discrete hypocoercive estimates for discontinuous Galerkin methods: application to the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system
This work addresses the need for stable and accurate numerical methods for plasma physics simulations, representing an incremental improvement with specific domain applications.
The paper tackled the numerical solution of the Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck system by developing structure-preserving discontinuous Galerkin schemes, proving exponential relaxation to equilibrium uniformly with respect to discretization parameters and verifying accuracy and long-time behavior through numerical simulations.
We develop and analyze a class of structure-preserving discontinuous Galerkin schemes for the nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson-Fokker-Planck model, reformulated as a hyperbolic system through a Hermite expansion in the velocity variable. We discretize the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation with the discontinuous Galerkin method, while the Poisson equation is approximated with either a discontinuous Galerkin method or a Raviart-Thomas mixed finite element method. We prove the exponential relaxation to equilibrium for suitable initial data, uniformly with respect to the discretization parameters thanks to discrete hypocoercivity arguments. Moreover, we check that the resulting semi-discrete schemes preserve the physical invariants along with the L 2 variational structure of the linearized model. Numerical simulations verify the accuracy and the long-time behavior of the scheme.