Inspired by the gradient flow viewpoint of the Landau equation and corresponding dynamic formulation of the Landau metric in [arXiv:2007.08591], we develop a novel implicit particle method for the Landau equation in the framework of the JKO scheme. We first reformulate the Landau metric in a computationally friendly form, and then translate it into the Lagrangian viewpoint using the flow map. A key observation is that, while the flow map evolves according to a rather complicated integral equation, the unknown component is merely a score function of the corresponding density plus an additional term in the null space of the collision kernel. This insight guides us in approximating the flow map with a neural network and simplifies the training. Additionally, the objective function is in a double summation form, making it highly suitable for stochastic methods. Consequently, we design a tailored version of stochastic gradient descent that maintains particle interactions and reduces the computational complexity. Compared to other deterministic particle methods, the proposed method enjoys exact entropy dissipation and unconditional stability, therefore making it suitable for large-scale plasma simulations over extended time periods.

We propose a particle method for numerically solving the Landau equation, inspired by the score-based transport modeling (SBTM) method for the Fokker-Planck equation. This method can preserve some important physical properties of the Landau equation, such as the conservation of mass, momentum, and energy, and decay of estimated entropy. We prove that matching the gradient of the logarithm of the approximate solution is enough to recover the true solution to the Landau equation with Maxwellian molecules. Several numerical experiments in low and moderately high dimensions are performed, with particular emphasis on comparing the proposed method with the traditional particle or blob method.

The Landau equation stands as one of the fundamental kinetic equations, modeling the evolution of charged particles undergoing Coulomb interaction [27]. It is particularly useful for plasmas where collision effects become non-negligible. Computing the Landau equation presents numerous challenges inherent in kinetic equations, including high dimensionality, multiple scales, and strong nonlinearity and non-locality. On the other hand, deep learning has progressively transformed the numerical computation of partial differential equations by leveraging neural networks' ability to approximate complex functions and the powerful optimization toolbox. However, straightforward application of deep learning to compute PDEs often encounters training difficulties and leads to a loss of physical fidelity. In this paper, we propose a score-based particle method that elegantly combines learning with structure-preserving particle methods. This method inherits the favorable conservative properties of deterministic particle methods while relying only on light training to dynamically obtain the score function over time. The learning component replaces the expensive density estimation in previous particle methods, drastically accelerating computation.

We propose a hybrid framework opPINN: physics-informed neural network (PINN) with operator learning for approximating the solution to the Fokker-Planck-Landau (FPL) equation. The opPINN framework is divided into two steps: Step 1 and Step 2. After the operator surrogate models are trained during Step 1, PINN can effectively approximate the solution to the FPL equation during Step 2 by using the pre-trained surrogate models. The operator surrogate models greatly reduce the computational cost and boost PINN by approximating the complex Landau collision integral in the FPL equation. The operator surrogate models can also be combined with the traditional numerical schemes. It provides a high efficiency in computational time when the number of velocity modes becomes larger. Using the opPINN framework, we provide the neural network solutions for the FPL equation under the various types of initial conditions, and interaction models in two and three dimensions. Furthermore, based on the theoretical properties of the FPL equation, we show that the approximated neural network solution converges to the a priori classical solution of the FPL equation as the pre-defined loss function is reduced.