Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

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Fighting the curse of dimensionality in kinetic simulations of plasmas

Speaker: Antoine Cerfon, Courant Institute

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, March 30, 2018, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

99% of the visible matter in the universe is in the plasma state. It consists of diffuse ensembles of electrically charged particles in which thermalizing collisions are infrequent. An accurate description of such systems requires kinetic models, in which one solves for the phase space distribution function of the particles, in general a real-valued function of 7 variables (6D + time).

The high dimensionality of kinetic equations leads to challenging and expensive numerical simulations, measured in millions of CPU hours for standard problems (and tens of days on present supercomputers). In this talk, we will present innovative approaches to address this challenge, and fight the curse of high dimension.