Nonlinear Landau Collisions Without Collision Tensors
Plasma Physics
2026-06-30 v1
Abstract
Far-from-equilibrium plasmas require nonlinear Coulomb collisions, but direct three-dimensional Hermite discretization of the Landau operator needs an impractical dense tensor. By porting quantum chemistry Coulomb-integral methods, we reduce the six-dimensional integrals to one-center Coulomb moments and separable exponential-sum contractions. This gives a four-order-of-magnitude working-memory reduction and enables nonlinear relaxation tests. Numerical simulations preserve invariants and show that finite-basis linearization changes relaxation and produces a fourfold angular error.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2606.31035,
title = {Nonlinear Landau Collisions Without Collision Tensors},
author = {R. Jorge and B. Herfray and C. Vega and V. Zhdankin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31035},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
6 pages, 3 figures