Structure-Preserving Particle Method for Collisional Plasmas

Explore a novel particle method for modeling collisional plasmas through this DDPS seminar talk by Professor Jingwei Hu from the University of Washington. Learn about the Vlasov-Maxwell-Landau equation as a first-principles physics model for plasmas and discover how this innovative approach collectively models particle transport, electromagnetic field effects, and Coulomb collisions. Understand the method's foundation in the regularization of the variational formulation of the Landau collision operator, which creates a discretization that conserves mass, momentum, and energy while dissipating entropy. Examine how collisional effects manifest as a fully deterministic effective force that naturally couples with the classical particle-in-cell (PIC) method. Review validation results from several plasma benchmark tests including collisional Landau damping, two-stream instability, and Weibel instability. Gain insights into structure-preserving numerical methods for multiscale kinetic equations and their applications across various science and engineering fields from a leading researcher whose work focuses on developing efficient computational approaches for complex plasma physics problems.