An Implicit, Asymptotic-Preserving and Energy-Charge-Conserving Method for the Vlasov-Maxwell System Near Quasi-Neutrality

Abstract

An implicit, asymptotic-preserving and energy-charge-conserving (APECC) Particle-In-Cell (PIC) method is proposed to solve the Vlasov-Maxwell (VM) equations in the quasi-neutral regime. Charge conservation is enforced by particle orbital averaging and fixed sub-time steps. The truncation error depending on the number of sub-time steps is further analyzed. The temporal discretization is chosen by the Crank-Nicolson method to conserve the discrete energy exactly. The key step in the asymptotic-preserving iteration for the nonlinear system is based on a decomposition of the current density deduced from the Vlasov equation in the source of the Maxwell model. Moreover, we show that the convergence is independent of the quasineutral parameter. Extensive numerical experiments show that the proposed method can achieve asymptotic preservation and energy-charge conservation.