Z-pinch stability investigations with Vlasov kinetic modeling in 3D+3V

Z-pinch stability and stabilizing factors for sausage (m=0) and kink (m=1) instabilities are investigated using the Vlasov-Maxwell kinetic model. Both short time scale results and a more comprehensive future computational experiment design are presented. Fully descriptive continuum kinetic simulations of plasma dynamics are challenged by the high dimensionality and computational expense of the Vlasov equation in six dimensions of space and velocity. Nevertheless, kinetic modeling is crucial for capturing plasma physics associated with strong deviations from local thermodynamic equilibrium and other departures from MHD or fluid model approximations (e.g. low collisionality and finite-Larmor radius). This work presents early 3D+3V Z-pinch simulations performed on the Frontier and Perlmutter GPU-accelerated supercomputers. Model simplifications (e.g., artificial electron mass, speed of light, and equilibrium perturbation by delta-f method) are explored to enable a more extensive follow-on computational experiment that will consider longer time evolution of the pinch dynamics. Computational performance and model mapping to GPU-acceleration are also presented.