Continuum kinetic modeling of cathode plasma sheath in Z-pinch

Continuum kinetic model simulations of plasma dynamics are challenged by the high dimensionality and computational expense of the Vlasov equation in up to six dimensions of space and velocity. Nevertheless, such modeling is crucial for capturing plasma physics associated with strong deviations from local thermodynamic equilibrium and other departures from fluid model approximations. This work presents a model and two-species (ion/electron) results from simulations of cathode to plasma interaction across a plasma sheath with implications important to Z-pinch formation and compression. The research includes work to accelerate and map an existing high order discontinuous Galerkin implementation to the latest GPU-accelerated supercomputers. An overview of the computational approach on massively-parallel GPU systems is presented.