An Energy-Conserving Fourier Particle-in-Cell Method with Asymptotic-Preserving Preconditioner for Vlasov-Amp\`ere System with Exact Curl-Free Constraint

Abstract

We present an efficient and accurate energy-conserving implicit particle-in-cell~(PIC) algorithm for the electrostatic Vlasov system, with particular emphasis on its high robustness for simulating complex plasma systems with multiple physical scales. This method consists of several indispensable elements: (\romannumeral1) the reformulation of the original Vlasov-Poisson system into an equivalent Vlasov-Amp\`ere system with divergence-/curl-free constraints; (\romannumeral2) a novel structure-preserving Fourier spatial discretization, which exactly preserves these constraints at the discrete level; (\romannumeral3) a preconditioned Anderson-acceleration algorithm for the solution of the highly nonlinear system; and (\romannumeral4) a linearized and uniform approximation of the implicit Crank-Nicolson scheme for various Debye lengths, based on the generalized Ohm's law, which serves as an asymptotic-preserving preconditioner for the proposed method. Numerical experiments are conducted, and comparisons are made among the proposed energy-conserving scheme, the classical leapfrog scheme, and a Strang operator-splitting scheme to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, especially for plasma systems crossing physical scales.