The Landau Collision Operator

Abstract: This is a pedagogical talk about the Landau operator, which is commonly used in kinetic models of plasmas. In this talk, I will introduce the Landau operator and discuss some of its fundamental properties, then show how it is formally derived from the Boltzmann collision operator, and finally present a state-of-the-art spectral method that is often used to evaluate the Landau operator numerically.

Speaker’s Bio: Cory Hauck is the Group Leader of the Multiscale Methods and Dynamics Group. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2006 from the University of Maryland. His research focuses on computational aspects of kinetic theory and hyperbolic partial differential equations, with applications in radiation transport, gas dynamics, and plasma physics.