High-order Hamiltonian splitting for the Vlasov-Poisson equations (Q515851)

The authors propose time splitting schemes for the Vlasov-Poisson equation, which is a Hamiltonian PDE for a Lie bracket and thus typical for nonlinear transport equations in fluid dynamics. The splitting is based on decomposing the Hamiltonian into a kinetic and an electric part and the construction of exact flows of the Hamiltonian equations. First, in the one-dimensional case efficient high-order splitting methods are derived. Each block of the scheme is explicit in time and is taking specific commutator relations into account. Thus higher-order methods can be derived. Then these are generalized to arbitrary dimension. The methods are called geometric integrators, as the structure of the equations is preserved up to phase space discretization errors. Moreover the Hamiltonian structure of the Vlasov-Poisson equations is described by introducing microcanonical Poisson brackets. Finally convergence results of the proposed splitting methods are presented and some numerical examples illustrate the properties of the schemes.