The Vlasov equation is a nonlinear partial differential equation that provides a first-principles description of the dynamics of plasmas. Its linear limit is routinely used in plasma physics to investigate plasma oscillations and stability. In this work, we present a quantum algorithm that simulates the linearized Vlasov equation with and without collisions, in the one-dimensional, electrostatic limit. Rather than solving this equation in its native spatial and velocity phase-space, we adopt an efficient representation in the dual space yielded by a Fourier-Hermite expansion. The Fourier-Hermite representation is exponentially more compact, thus yielding a classical algorithm that can match the performance of a previously proposed quantum algorithm for this problem. This representation results in a system of linear ordinary differential equations which can be solved with well-developed quantum algorithms: Hamiltonian simulation in the collisionless case, and quantum ODE solvers in the collisional case. In particular, we demonstrate that a quadratic speedup in system size is attainable.
In this work we recast the collisional Vlasov-Maxwell and Vlasov-Poisson equations as systems of coupled stochastic and partial differential equations, and we derive stochastic variational principles which underlie such reformulations. We also propose a stochastic particle method for the collisional Vlasov-Maxwell equations and provide a variational characterization of it, which can be used as a basis for a further development of stochastic structure-preserving particle-in-cell integrators.
The modification of the Vlasov equation, in its standard form describing a charged particle distribution in the six-dimensional phase space, is derived explicitly within a formal Hamiltonian approach for arbitrarily curved spacetime. The equation accounts simultaneously for the Lorentz force and the effects of general relativity, with the latter appearing as the gravity force and an additional force due to the extrinsic curvature of spatial hypersurfaces. For an arbitrary spatial metric, the equations of collisionless hydrodynamics are also obtained in the usual three-vector form.
Ion acceleration due to the interaction between a short high-intensity laser pulse and a moderately overdense plasma target is studied using Eulerian Vlasov-Maxwell simulations. The effects of variations in the plasma density profile and laser pulse parameters are investigated, and the interplay of collisionless shock and target normal sheath acceleration is analyzed. It is shown that the use of a layered-target with a combination of light and heavy ions, on the front and rear side respectively, yields a strong quasi-static sheath-field on the rear side of the heavy-ion part of the target. Thi…
Collisional effects can play an essential role in the dynamics of plasma waves by setting a minimum damping rate and by interfering with wave-particle resonances. Kinetic simulations of the effects of electron-ion pitch angle scattering on Electron Plasma Waves (EPWs) are presented here. In particular, the effects of such collisions on the frequency and damping of small-amplitude EPWs for a range of collision rates and wave phase velocities are computed and compared with theory. Both the Vlasov simulations and linear kinetic theory find the direct contribution of electron-ion collisions to wav…
We study the linearized Vlasov equations and the linearized Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equations in the weakly collisional limit in a uniform magnetic field. In both cases, we consider periodic confinement and Maxwellian (or close to Maxwellian) backgrounds. In the collisionless case, for modes transverse to the magnetic field, we provide a precise decomposition into a countably infinite family of standing waves for each spatial mode. These are known as Bernstein modes in the physics literature, though the decomposition is not an obvious consequence of any existing arguments that we are aware of. We…
In this paper, we study Landau damping in the weakly collisional limit of a Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation with nonlinear collisions in the phase-space $(x,v) \in \mathbb T_x^n \times \mathbb R^n_v$. The goal is four-fold: (A) to understand how collisions suppress plasma echoes and enable Landau damping in agreement with linearized theory in Sobolev spaces, (B) to understand how phase mixing accelerates collisional relaxation, (C) to understand better how the plasma returns to global equilibrium during Landau damping, and (D) to rule out that collision-driven nonlinear instabilities dominate. W…
Numerical diffusion is introduced by any numerical scheme as soon as small scales fluctuations, generated during the dynamical evolution of a collisionless plasma, become comparable to the grid size. Here we investigate the role of numerical dissipation in collisionless plasma simulations by studying the non linear regime of the two stream instability. We show that the long time evolution of the Vlasov - Poisson system can be affected by the used algorithm.
Turbulence at kinetic scales is an unresolved and ubiquitous phenomenon that characterizes both space and laboratory plasmas. Recently, new theories, {\it in-situ} spacecraft observations and numerical simulations suggest a novel scenario for turbulence, characterized by a so-called phase space cascade -- the formation of fine structures, both in physical and velocity space. This new concept is here extended by directly taking into account the role of inter-particle collisions, modeled through the nonlinear Landau operator or the simplified Dougherty operator. The characteristic times, associa…
We study Landau damping in the 1+1D Vlasov-Poisson system using a Fourier-Hermite spectral representation. We describe the propagation of free energy in phase space using forwards and backwards propagating Hermite modes recently developed for gyrokinetics [Schekochihin et al. (2014)]. The change in the electric field corresponds to the net Hermite flux via a free energy evolution equation. In linear Landau damping, decay in the electric field corresponds to forward propagating Hermite modes; in nonlinear damping, the initial decay is followed by a growth phase characterised by the generation o…
Kinetic simulations based on the Eulerian Hybrid Vlasov-Maxwell (HVM) formalism permit the examination of plasma turbulence with useful resolution of the proton velocity distribution function (VDF). The HVM model is employed here to study the balance of energy, focusing on channels of conversion that lead to proton kinetic effects, including growth of internal energy and temperature anisotropies. We show that this Eulerian simulation approach, which is almost noise-free, is able to provide an accurate energy balance for protons. The results demonstrate explicitly that the recovered temperature…
A recent paper [Phys. Plasmas 20, 032304 (2013)] considered the forced linear Vlasov equation as a model for the quasi-steady state of a single stable plasma wavenumber interacting with a bath of turbulent fluctuations. This approach gives some insight into possible energy flows without solving for nonlinear dynamics. The central result of the present work is that the forced linear Vlasov equation exhibits asymptotically zero (irreversible) dissipation to all orders under a detuning of the forcing frequency and the characteristic frequency associated with particle streaming. We first prove thi…
The low-frequency limit of Maxwell equations is considered in the Maxwell-Vlasov system. This limit produces a neutral Vlasov system that captures essential features of plasma dynamics, while neglecting radiation effects. Euler-Poincaré reduction theory is used to show that the neutral Vlasov kinetic theory possesses a variational formulation in both Lagrangian and Eulerian coordinates. By construction, the model recovers all collisionless neutral models employed in plasma simulations. Then, comparisons between the neutral Vlasov system and hybrid kinetic-fluid models are presented in the line…
A collisionless kinetic plasma model may often be cast as an infinite-dimensional noncanonical Hamiltonian system. I show that, when this is the case, the model can be discretized in space and particles while preserving its Hamiltonian structure, thereby producing a finite-dimensional Hamiltonian system that approximates the original kinetic model. I apply the general theory to two example systems: the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system with spin, and a gyrokinetic Vlasov-Maxwell system.
A general solution to linearized Vlasov equation for an electron electrostatic wave in a homogeneous unmagnetized plasma is derived. The quasi-linear diffusion coefficient resulting from this solution is a continuous function of omega in contrast to that derived from the traditional Vlasov treatment. The general solution is also equivalent to the Landau treatment of the plasma normal oscillations, and hence leads to the well-known Landau damping.
We consider linear stability of steady states of 1(1/2) and 3D Vlasov-Maxwell systems for collisionless plasmas. The linearized systems can be written as separable Hamiltonian systems with constraints. By using a general theory for separable Hamiltonian systems, we recover the sharp linear stability criteria obtained previously by different approaches. Moreover, we obtain the exponential trichotomy estimates for the linearized Vlasov-Maxwell systems in both relativistic and nonrelativistic cases.
Nonlinear solitary solutions to the Vlasov-Poisson set of equations are studied in order to investigate their stability by employing a fully-kinetic simulation approach. The study is carried out in the ion-acoustic regime for a collisionless, electrostatic and Maxwellian electron-ion plasma. The trapped population of electrons is modeled based on well-known Schamel distribution function. Head-on mutual collisions of nonlinear solutions are performed in order to examine their collisional stability. The findings include three major aspects: (I) These nonlinear solutions are found to be divided i…
Collisionless plasmas, such as those encountered in tokamaks, exhibit a rich variety of instabilities. The physical origin, triggering mechanisms and fundamental understanding of many plasma instabilities, however, are still open problems. We investigate the stability properties of a collisionless Vlasov plasma in a stationary homogeneous magnetic field. We narrow the scope of our investigation to the case of Maxwellian plasma. For the first time using a fully kinetic approach we show the emergence of the local instability, a transient growth, followed by classical Landau damping in a stable m…
The perturbative variational formulation of the Vlasov-Maxwell equations is presented up to third order in the perturbation analysis. From the second and third-order Lagrangian densities, respectively, the first-order and second-order Vlasov-Maxwell equations are expressed in gauge-invariant and gauge-independent forms. Upon deriving the reduced second-order Vlasov-Maxwell Lagrangian for the linear nonadiabatic gyrokinetic Vlasov-Maxwell equations, the reduced Lagrangian densities for the linear drift-wave equation and the linear hybrid kinetic-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations are derived, …
Kinetic simulations of collisionless (or weakly collisional) plasmas using the Vlasov equation are often infeasible due to high resolution requirements and the exponential scaling of computational cost with respect to dimension. Recently, it has been proposed that matrix product state (MPS) methods, a quantum-inspired but classical algorithm, can be used to solve partial differential equations with exponential speed-up, provided that the solution can be compressed and efficiently represented as an MPS within some tolerable error threshold. In this work, we explore the practicality of MPS metho…
The Vlasov equation for the collisionless evolution of the single-particle probability distribution function (PDF) is a well-known Lie-Poisson Hamiltonian system. Remarkably, the operation of taking the moments of the Vlasov PDF preserves the Lie-Poisson structure. The individual particle motions correspond to singular solutions of the Vlasov equation. The paper focuses on singular solutions of the problem of geodesic motion of the Vlasov moments. These singular solutions recover geodesic motion of the individual particles.
Kinetic Vlasov equation for collisional Maxwellian plasmas is used. Collision integral of BGK (Bhatnagar, Gross and Krook) type is applied. From Vlasov equation we find distribution function of electrons in square-law approximation on size of transversal electric field. The formula for electric current calculation is deduced. This formula contains an one-dimensional quadrature. It is shown, that nonlinearity leads to revealing of the longitudinal electric current directed along a wave vector. This longitudinal current is perpendicular to known so-called transversal classical current. The class…
In this paper, we consider the nonlinear Vlasov-Poisson equations in a weakly collisional regime and study the linear Boltzmann collision operator. We prove that Landau damping still occurs in this case.
We present a new Vlasov code for collisionless plasmas in the nonrelativistic regime. A Darwin approximation is used for suppressing electromagnetic vacuum modes. The spatial integration is based on an extension of the flux-conservative scheme, introduced by Filbet et al. [J. Comp. Phys. Vol. 172 (2001) 166]. Performance and accuracy is demonstrated by comparing it to a standard finite differences scheme for two test cases, including a Harris sheet magnetic reconnection scenario. This comparison suggests that the presented scheme is a promising alternative to finite difference schemes.
The genesis of the ion axial velocity distribution function (VDF) is analyzed for collisionless Hall thruster discharges. An analytical form for the VDF is obtained from the Vlasov equation, by applying the Tonks-Langmuir theory in the thruster channel, under the simplifying assumptions of monoenergetic creation of ions and steady state. The equivalent set of 1D unsteady anisotropic moment equations is derived from the Vlasov equation, and simple phenomenological closures are formulated, assuming a polynomial shape for the ions VDF. The analytical results and the anisotropic moment equations a…
We study the expansion of ultracold neutral plasmas in the regime in which inelastic collisions are negligible. The plasma expands due to the thermal pressure of the electrons, and for an initial spherically symmetric Gaussian density profle, the expansion is self-similar. Measurements of the plasma size and ion kinetic energy using fluorescence imaging and spectroscopy show that the expansion follows an analytic solution of the Vlasov equations for an adiabatically expanding plasma.
We derive the conductivity tensor for axisymmetric perturbations of a hot, collisionless, and charge-neutral plasma in the shearing sheet approximation. Our results generalize the well-known linear Vlasov theory for uniform plasmas to differentially rotating plasmas and can be used for wide range of kinetic stability calculations. We apply these results to the linear theory of the magneto-rotational instability (MRI) in collisionless plasmas. We show analytically and numerically how the general kinetic theory results derived here reduce in appropriate limits to previous results in the literatu…
These lecture notes were presented by Allan N. Kaufman in his graduate plasma theory course and a follow-on special topics course (Physics 242A, B, C and Physics 250 at the University of California Berkeley). The notes follow the order of the lectures. The equations and derivations are as Kaufman presented, but the text is a reconstruction of Kaufman's discussion and commentary. The notes were transcribed by Bruce I. Cohen in 1971 and 1972, and word-processed, edited, and illustrations added by Cohen in 2017 and 2018. The series of lectures are divided into four major parts: (1) collisionless …
The Caldeira-Leggett Hamiltonian (Eq. (1) below) describes the interaction of a discrete harmonic oscillator with a continuous bath of harmonic oscillators. This system is a standard model of dissipation in macroscopic low temperature physics, and has applications to superconductors, quantum computing, and macroscopic quantum tunneling. The similarities between the Caldeira-Leggett model and the linearized Vlasov-Poisson equation are analyzed, and it is shown that the damping in the Caldeira-Leggett model is analogous to that of Landau damping in plasmas [1]. An invertible linear transformatio…
We consider the linear stability problem for a 3D cylindrically symmetric equilibrium of the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system that describes a collisionless plasma. For an equilibrium whose distribution function decreases monotonically with the particle energy, we obtained a linear stability criterion in our previous paper. Here we prove that this criterion is sharp; that is, there would otherwise be an exponentially growing solution to the linearized system. Therefore for the class of symmetric Vlasov-Maxwell equilibria, we establish an energy principle for linear stability. We also treat t…
In the paper, gridless particle techniques are presented in order to solve problems involving electrostatic, collisionless plasmas. The method makes use of computational particles having the shape of spherical shells or of rings, and can be used to study cases in which the plasma has spherical or axial symmetry, respectively. As a computational grid is absent, the technique is particularly suitable when the plasma occupies a rapidly changing space region.
We discuss a spectral method for the numerical solution of the Vlasov-Poisson system where the velocity space is decomposed by means of an Hermite basis. We describe a semi-implicit time discretization that extends the range of numerical stability relative to an explicit scheme. We also introduce and discuss the effects of an artificial collisional operator, which is necessary to take care of the velocity space filamentation problem, unavoidable in collisionless plasmas. The computational efficiency and the cost-effectiveness of this method are compared to a Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method in th…
In this paper we study the fluctuation spectrum of a linearized Vlasov-Poisson equation in the presence of a small external electric field. Conditions for the control of the linear fluctuations by an external electric field are established.
Electrostatic structures have been observed in many regions of space plasmas, including the solar wind, the magnetosphere, the auroral acceleration region. One possible theoretical description of some of these structures is the concept of Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal (BGK) modes, which are exact nonlinear steady-state solutions of the Vlasov-Poisson system of equations in collisionless kinetic theory. We generalize exact solutions of two-dimensional BGK modes in a magnetized plasma with finite magnetic field strength [Ng, Bhattacharjee, and Skiff, Phys. Plasmas {\bf13}, 055903 (2006)] to cases wit…
In a collisionless Vlasov-Poisson (V-P) electron plasma system, two types of modes for electric field perturbation exist: the exponentially Landau damped electron plasma waves and the initial-value sensitive ballistic modes. Here, the V-P system is modified slightly to a Vlasov-Ampere (V-A) system. A new constant residual mode is revealed. Mathematically, this mode comes from the Laplace transform of an initial electric field perturbation, and physically represents that an initial perturbation (e.g., external electric field perturbation) would not be damped away. Thus, this residual mode is mo…
In collisionless and weakly collisional plasmas, the particle distribution function is a rich tapestry of the underlying physics. However, actually leveraging the particle distribution function to understand the dynamics of a weakly collisional plasma is challenging. The equation system of relevance, the Vlasov-Maxwell-Fokker-Planck (VM-FP) system of equations, is difficult to numerically integrate, and traditional methods such as the particle-in-cell method introduce counting noise into the distribution function. In this thesis, we present a new algorithm for the discretization of VM-FP syste…
The dynamics of collisionless plasmas can be modelled by the Vlasov-Maxwell system of equations. An Eulerian approach is needed to accurately describe processes that are governed by high energy tails in the distribution function, but is of limited efficiency for high dimensional problems. The use of an adaptive mesh can reduce the scaling of the computational cost with the dimension of the problem. Here, we present a relativistic Eulerian Vlasov-Maxwell solver with block-structured adaptive mesh refinement in one spatial and one momentum dimension. The discretization of the Vlasov equation is …
Structure preservation using discrete gradients in the Vlasov-Poisson-Landau system
National Research Council, Naval Research Laboratory（国家研究委员会，海军研究实验室）；University at Buffalo, The State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）
The nonlinear Vlasov equation contains the full nonlinear dynamics and collective effects of a given Hamiltonian system. The linearized approximation is not valid for a variety of interesting systems, nor is it simple to extend to higher order. It is also well-known that the linearized approximation to the Vlasov equation is invalid for long times, due to its inability to correctly capture fine phase space structures. We derive a perturbation theory for the Vlasov equation based on the underlying Hamiltonian structure of the phase space evolution. We obtain an explicit perturbation series for …
