A multilevel Monte Carlo method for asymptotic-preserving particle schemes

Emil Løvbak, Giovanni Samaey, Stefan Vandewalle

Published 2019-07-10Version 1

Kinetic equations model distributions of particles in position-velocity phase space. Often, one is interested in studying the long-time behavior of particles in the diffusive limit, in which the collision rate tends to infinity. Classical particle-based techniques suffer from a strict time-step restriction in this limit, to maintain stability. Asymptotic-preserving schemes avoid this problem, but introduce an additional time discretization error, possibly resulting in an unacceptably large bias for larger time steps. Here, we present and analyze a multilevel Monte Carlo scheme that reduces this bias by combining estimates using a hierarchy of different time step sizes. We demonstrate how to correlate trajectories from this scheme, using different time steps. We also present a strategy for selecting the levels in the multilevel scheme. Our approach significantly reduces the computation required to perform accurate simulations of the considered kinetic equations, compared to classical Monte Carlo approaches.