Geometric particle-in-cell methods for Vlasov--Poisson equations with Maxwell--Boltzmann electrons

Abstract: In this paper, variational and Hamiltonian formulations of the Vlasov--Poisson equations with Maxwell--Boltzmann electrons are introduced. Structure-preserving particle-in-cell methods are constructed by discretizing the action integral and the Poisson bracket. We use the Hamiltonian splitting methods and the discrete gradient methods for time discretizations to preserve the geometric structure and energy, respectively. The global neutrality condition is also conserved by the discretizations. The schemes are asymptotic preserving when taking the quasi-neutral limit, and the limiting schemes are structure-preserving for the limiting model. Numerical experiments of finite grid instability, Landau damping, and two-stream instability illustrate the behavior of the proposed numerical methods.