Plasma simulation with few particles

Abstract

A numerical method of plasma simulation is described which allows one to simulate Vlasov plasmas with very few degrees of freedom. Linear effects can be simulated by an amount of information corresponding to less than 100 particles, nonlinear effects require less than 500 “particles” in one spatial and one velocity dimension. The method is based on replacing the infinite real eigenvalue spectrum of the free streaming terms of the Vlasov equation by a finite discrete spectrum. An imaginary damping term is artificially added to the eigenvalues, and, thus, recurrence effects are minimized.