Development of a Renormalization Group Approach to Multi-Scale Plasma Physics Computation.

摘要

During this quarter, NumerEx and its associated research institutions worked on 1. Consideration of the EMPIC numerical grid heating problem from the point of view of renormalization group analysis. This work included a literature survey and presentations at conferences at the University of Wisconsin and Stanford (Caflisch, UCLA). 2. An analysis of the effect of the Coulombic collision operator on a bump on the tail of a Maxwellian distribution and its application to stabilization of cathode flicker. This work included a draft manuscript on the 1-d evolution of bump, and another on non-adiabatic evolution via extremal statistics of stochastic ODEs (Promislow, MSU). 3. Formulation of a geometric optics approach to the perturbation analysis of the Child-Langmuir-Jaffe virtual cathode problem. A manuscript was begun on this approach, and another on the stable and unstable modes of this problem (Caflisch, UCLA).