Study of conservation and recurrence of Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin schemes for Vlasov-Poisson systems (Q364673)

The Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin schemes are studied for Vlasov-Poisson systems as a model of collisionless plasma. Only one-dimensional systems are considered and boundary conditions are ignored. Two common polynomial solution family spaces are put into focus. The scheme preserves the conservation of charge, momentum and total energy up to approximation errors when the polynomial order is taken big enough. The electric field is obtained through the classical representation by Green's function for the Poisson equation. A rigorous study of numerical recurrence is shown for one of the polynomial family, the eigenvalues and the amplification matrix are determined. It is shown that this new scheme of calculation gives numerically the recurrence time close to the result of classical calculations when the order of approximation is high enough. The method is shown by computing the test cases of Landau damping, the two-stream instability and the kinetic electrostatic electron nonlinear waves. The paper contains a remarkably long list of references (58 titles).