The accurate prediction of occurrence and strength of kinetic instabilities in plasmas remains a significant challenge in nuclear fusion research. To accurately capture the plasma's dynamics one is required to solve the Vlasov equation for several species which, however, comes with a number of challenges as high dimensionality of the model as well as turbulence and development of fine but relevant structures in the distribution function. The predominantly employed Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method often lacks the accuracy to resolve the dynamics correctly, which can only be remedied by going to higher resolutions but at a prohibitorily high cost due to the high-dimensionality. Thus in this work we discuss the usage of the numerical flow iteration (NuFI) as high fidelity approach, in contrast to e.g. PIC or grid-based approaches, to solve the multi-species Vlasov equation in modes leading to kinetic instabilities.
This paper presents a high-fidelity approach to solving the Vlasov equation, which is crucial for accurately predicting plasma instabilities in nuclear fusion research. The authors discuss using the Numerical Flow Iteration (NuFI) method, which offers improved accuracy compared to traditional Particle-in-Cell (PIC) methods, to simulate the dynamics of multi-species plasmas.