Well-posedness and finite element approximation of the electrostatic shear Alfvén wave equations

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the well-posedness and finite element approximation of the electrostatic shear Alfvén wave equations, a coupled system of two partial differential equations arising in plasma physics as a simplified sub-model of the drift-reduced Braginskii equations. To this end, anisotropic Sobolev spaces depending on the normalized magnetic field $\b$ are introduced, together with a Poincaré-type inequality along the integral curves of $\b$, which holds under a geometric directedness condition on the magnetic field. Using these tools, existence, uniqueness, and stability of a weak solution are established via the Faedo-Galerkin method. It is also shown that the geometric condition is satisfied in tokamak and stellarator configurations. A numerical scheme is then proposed, combining Lagrange finite elements in space with a Crank-Nicolson discretization in time. The scheme is shown to conserve a discrete energy exactly in the homogeneous case, and a priori error estimates are derived in the natural energy norm. Several numerical experiments are reported in two and three space dimensions, which confirm the theoretical results and indicate that the geometric condition on the magnetic field is necessary for the invertibility of the discrete system matrix.