An adaptive, high-order phase-space remapping for the two-dimensional   Vlasov-Poisson equations
  The numerical solution of high dimensional Vlasov equation is usually performed by particle-in-cell (PIC) methods. However, due to the well-known numerical noise, it is challenging to use PIC methods to get a precise description of the distribution function in phase space. To control the numerical error, we introduce an adaptive phase-space remapping which regularizes the particle distribution by periodically reconstructing the distribution function on a hierarchy of phase-space grids with high-order interpolations. The positivity of the distribution function can be preserved by using a local redistribution technique. The method has been successfully applied to a set of classical plasma problems in one dimension. In this paper, we present the algorithm for the two dimensional Vlasov-Poisson equations. An efficient Poisson solver with infinite domain boundary conditions is used. The parallel scalability of the algorithm on massively parallel computers will be discussed. 
Bei Wang, Greg Miller, Phil Colella
math.NA cs.CE physics.comp-ph