The primary objective of this research is to develop accurate and efficient computational methods for solving kinetic models of plasma. Such models are vital in understanding phenomena such as magnetically-confined fusion reactors, laser-plasma accelerators, space weather, and astrophysical events. In this project,discontinuous we pursue two different types of approaches:
- Replacing the full solution by a finite number of moments via a moment-closure (i.e., replacing a full particle distribution function by some low order statistics); and
- Developing efficient methods for the full Vlasov system via novel time-stepping schemes.
In both cases, we are developing specially designed high-order discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods to obtain numerical solutions.