Vlasov-Fokker-Planck-Maxwell Simulations for Plasmas in Inertial Confinement Fusion

This work presents a code to simulate collisions and laser-plasma interactions of multiple-species plasmas by solving 1D3V Vlasov-Fokker-Planck-Maxwell equations. The distribution functions of all species are expanded into spherical harmonic series of arbitrary order. Each electron or ion species possesses its distinct and suitable velocity mesh and the number of harmonics. Collisions between different ion species are considered and treated with the Fokker-Planck collision term. The code employs the total variation diminishing (TVD) scheme to avoid numerical instabilities in the region of steep density, rarefied plasma-vacuum interface, and non-periodic boundary conditions, which makes it possible to simulate cases that are close to actual physical scenes. The number of particles is globally conserved for each species, the energy for each species is conserved for collisions between the same species, and total energy is conserved for collisions between different species.