Scientific Computing

The complexity of plasma turbulence as a physical phenomenon fundamentally requires large-scale simulations as a tool for discovery and understanding. Beyond being a highly nonlinear physical system that defies solely analytic study, many plasma systems of interest span a large range of physical scales; they often span multiple plasma regimes (from, e.g., the fluid regime to fully kinetic) either simultaneously in different regions of a system or as the system evolves over time; and they require the incorporation of additional physics such as nuclear reactions or radiative emission. In addition, making precise connections between the physical phenomena that occur and the experimental diagnostics that probe them requires careful modeling of both. The resulting multiscale, multiphysics problem is thus incredibly challenging and requires both the largest computers available as well as cutting-edge numerical methods.

Numerical methods enabling high order multiphysics plasma simulations

• Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory Methods and Discontinuous Galerkin (DG)
• Constrained transport methods to address divergence of the magnetic field
• Positivity preserving methods with stiff source terms
• Novel implicit time stepping and multi-temperature MHD models
• Equations of State and Radiative Losses in Complex Flow