English

Simulation of multi-species kinetic instabilities with the Numerical Flow Iteration

Plasma Physics 2025-11-05 v1 Computational Physics

Abstract

Kinetic instabilities are one of the most challenging aspects in computational plasma physics. Accurately capturing their onset and evolution requires fine resolution of the high-dimensional distribution functions of each relevant species, which quickly becomes computationally prohibitively expensive. Additionally, plasma dynamics is an inherently multi-scale phenomenon due to the vast separation of scales between heavy ions and light-weight electrons. In previous work the Numerical Flow Iteration (NuFI) was suggested as a high-fidelity alternative with reduced memory complexity making it an interesting candidate to simulate complicated kinetic instabilities. In this work we extend NuFI to non-periodic boundary conditions and demonstrate how it is possible to reduce the computational complexity to allow for longer simulation periods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.02405,
  title  = {Simulation of multi-species kinetic instabilities with the Numerical Flow Iteration},
  author = {Rostislav-Paul Wilhelm and Manuel Torrilhon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.02405},
  year   = {2025}
}