Stability analysis of implicit time discretizations for the Compton-scattering Fokker-Planck equation (Q834139)

The authors perform a stability analysis of three implicit time discretizations for a class of Fokker-Planck equations used to describe Compton scattering of photons in high energy density applications. They show how two of these schemes (so-called Linearized Implicit and Fully Implicit) are unconditionally stable, so that they cannot generate oscillatory solutions regardless of time-step size, whereas another scheme (called Semi-Implicit) can suffer from instabilities and nonphysical oscillations for sufficiently large time steps. They further develop two time-step limits to improve the Semi-Implicit discretization scheme, so as to avoid unstable solutions and nonphysical oscillations.