Seminar

Plasmas are capable of supporting coherent, large-amplitude electric 

fields making plasma-based particles accelerators technologically 

attractive for applications ranging from high energy physics to 

biomedical imaging.  The relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system is the 

standard basis for theoretical study of these devices.  Unfortunately, 

the plasma states of interest are strongly nonlinear, thus making 

quantitative predictions is generally analytically intractable. 

Further, direct solution of the governing equations of a six-dimensional 

phase space is well beyond the reach of existing and near-term 

high-performance computing systems.  I will describe a various 

reductions of the Vlasov-Maxwell system that exploit the phenomenology 

of these devices to obtain models that are computationally tractable 

while preserving physical fidelity.