Integer Lattice Dynamics for Vlasov-Poisson

Understand

We revisit the integer lattice (IL) method to numerically solve the Vlasov-Poisson equations, and show that a slight variant of the method is a very easy, viable, and efficient numerical approach to study the dynamics of self-gravitating, collisionless systems.

• The distribution function lives in a discretized lattice phase-space, and each time-step in the simulation corresponds to a simple permutation of the lattice sites.
• Hence, the method is Lagrangian, conservative, and fully time-reversible.
• IL complements other existing methods, such as N-body/particle mesh (computationally efficient, but affected by Monte-Carlo sampling noise and two-body relaxation) and finite volume (FV) direct integration schemes (expensive, accurate but diffusive).