Princeton University Astroplasmas Seminar

Relativistic plasma is ubiquitous in astrophysics. Physically it can be studied by using the so-called Vlasov/Boltzmann equation that describes how the 6D (i.e., 3D3V) phase space of the plasma evolves. In my talk I will discuss our current efforts in building a general open source set of tools for simulating such systems known as the plasma-toolkit code. The toolkit is build on top of a new massively parallel grid infrastructure that can harness the next-generation exascale computing resources. In order to deal with the immense memory consumption of the full 6D phase space, the current Vlasov solver is designed to have aggressive adaptive mesh refinement capabilities both in configuration and momentum space. These new computational advances allow us to progress into a new era of simulating relativistic kinetic plasma from first principles in full 6D. I will end my talk by presenting some of our first physical results from running the toolkit in 1D3V.