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Computational and Applied Mathematics: Jingwei Hu, University of Washington, Structure-Preserving Particle Method for the Vlasov-Maxwell-Landau Equation
January 19 | 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm EST
The Vlasov-Maxwell-Landau equation is often regarded as the first-principle physics model for plasmas. We introduce a novel particle method for this equation that collectively models particle transport, electromagnetic field effects, and particle collisions. The method arises from a regularization of the variational formulation of the Landau collision operator, leading to a discretization of the operator that conserves mass, momentum, and energy, as well as dissipates the entropy. The collisional effects appear as a fully deterministic effective force, which can be naturally coupled with the classical particle-in-cell (PIC) method. We validate the method on several plasma benchmark tests, including collisional Landau damping, two-stream instability, and Weibel instability.