Matt Mitchell - How to Simulate a Plasma

 How to Simulate a Plasma

Accurately modeling the behavior of plasmas is vitally important to many scientific pursuits, from designing fusion reactors, to improving particle accelerators, to understanding the structure of the sun. However, the large scale behavior of plasmas is incredibly complex, and plasma experiments are difficult to conduct, so it's often better to simulate them on supercomputers. But what's the best way to simulate a plasma? How can we improve our models to better reproduce physical behavior? In this talk, I'll discuss our group's work on a new approach to plasma simulation and some of the mathematical tricks we used to create it.

 Matt Mitchell

 CIPS (Center for Integrated Plasma Studies)