Title: Enhanced conservation properties of Vlasov codes through coupling with conservative fluid models,
Abstract: Many phenomena in collisionless plasma physics require a kinetic description.
The evolution of the phase space density can be modeled by means of the Vlasov
equation, which has to be solved numerically in most of the relevant cases. One
of the problems that often arise in such simulations is the violation of
important physical conservation laws. Numerical diffusion in phase space
translates into unphysical heating, which can increase the overall energy
significantly, depending on the time scale and the plasma regime. In this
paper, a general and straightforward way of improving conservation properties
of Vlasov schemes is presented that can potentially be applied to a variety of
different codes. The basic idea is to use fluid models with good conservation
properties for correcting kinetic models. The higher moments that are missing
in the fluid models are provided by the kinetic codes, so that both kinetic and
fluid codes compensate the weaknesses of each other in a closed feedback loop.