Data-driven discovery of reduced plasma physics models from fully kinetic simulations

Abstract

At the core of some of the most important problems in plasma physics---from controlled nuclear fusion to the acceleration of cosmic rays---is the challenge to describe nonlinear, multiscale plasma dynamics. The development of reduced plasma models that balance between accuracy and complexity is critical to advancing theoretical comprehension and enabling holistic computational descriptions of these problems. Here we report the data-driven discovery of accurate reduced plasma models, in the form of partial differential equations, directly from first-principles particle-in-cell simulations. We achieve this by using an integral formulation of sparsity-based model-discovery techniques and show that this is crucial to robustly identify the governing equations in the presence of discrete particle noise. We demonstrate the potential of this approach by recovering the fundamental hierarchy of plasma physics models---from the Vlasov equation to magnetohydrodynamics. Our findings show that this data-driven methodology offers a promising route to accelerate the development of reduced theoretical models of complex nonlinear plasma phenomena and to design computationally efficient algorithms for multiscale plasma simulations.