Multipole expansions for the Fokker-Planck-Landau operator (Q1377032)

The author derives a sequence of operators approximating the Fokker-Planck-Landau (FPL) collision operator. This sequence is obtained by applying the fast multiple method based on the work by \textit{L. Greengard} and \textit{V. Rokhlin} [J. Comput. Phys. 73, 325-348 (1987; Zbl 0629.65005)], and tends to the exact FPL operator with arbitrary accuracy. These approximating operators possess physical properties such as the conservation of mass, momentum, energy, and decay of entropy. Furthermore, the quadratic structure due to the velocity coupling in the expression for the FPL operator is removed in the approximating operators. This fact reduces significantly the computational cost of numerical simulations of the FPL equation. The paper concludes with a discussion of numerical conservative and entropy discretizations for solving the homogeneous FPL equation using the fast multipole method. These approximations have deterministic character; moreover, the multipole-multigrid algorithm applied to the Coulombian case is shown to yield satisfactory results in terms of accuracy and CPU time.