Semi-Lagrangian Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Adaptive Mesh Refinement for the Vlasov--Poisson System in 1X+3V

Mark F. Adams

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arXiv · 2603.19959

Semi-Lagrangian Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Adaptive Mesh Refinement for the Vlasov--Poisson System in 1X+3V

Mark F. Adams

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Abstract

We extend the semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin (SLDG) method of Einkemmer to velocity grids with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and to three-dimensional velocity space. The original SLDG formulation assumes uniform cell widths, which permits the overlap matrices to be precomputed once per fractional shift and reused for every cell. On an adaptively refined mesh, neighboring cells may differ in size, invalidating this assumption. We develop a hybrid sweep strategy: conforming cells in the mesh interior use precomputed per-level overlap matrices (the fast path), while nonconforming cells at refinement boundaries evaluate generalized overlap integrals on the fly (the slow path). A compressed sparse row (CSR) pencil data structure organizes the dimensional splitting along each velocity coordinate, with weighted accumulation for coarse cells that appear in multiple pencils. The method is extended from one to three velocity dimensions using tensor-product DG elements on hexahedral cells provided by PETSc's PetscFE class. We verify the solver on the standard Landau damping benchmark in 1X+3V, demonstrating correct damping rates, exact mass conservation, and convergence behavior with polynomial degree and AMR refinement level.

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Mark F. Adams. 2026-03-20. Semi-Lagrangian Discontinuous Galerkin Method with Adaptive Mesh Refinement for the Vlasov--Poisson System in 1X+3V. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19959

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