The multi-water-bag equations for collisionless kinetic modeling (Q1042708)

In this paper the multi-water-bag model for collisionless kinetic equations is considered. The water bag model was shown to bring the bridge between fluid and kinetic description of a collisionless plasma, allowing to keep the kinetic aspect of the problem with the same complexity as the fluid model. In this paper the multi-water-bag representation of the statistical distribution function of particles is viewed as a special class of exact weak solution of the Vlasov equation, allowing then to reduce this latter into a set of hydrodynamic equations while keeping its kinetic character. After recalling the link of multi-water-bag model with kinetic formulation of conservation laws, different multi-water-bag (MWB) models, namely the Poisson-MWB, the quasineutral-MWB and the electromagnetic-MWB models are derived. These models are very promising because they reveal to be very useful for the theory and numerical simulations of laser-plasma and gyrokinetic physics. In this paper some existence and uniqueness results for classical solutions of these different models are proved. Then the authors propose numerical schemes based on Discontinuous Galerkin methods to solve the involved equations. Some numerical simulations of non-linear problems arising in plasma physics for which the analytical results are known, finalize this work.