NEOPIC: A Neural Operator Framework for Particle-based Kinetic Plasma Simulations

Sriramkrishnan Muralikrishnan, Chelsea Maria John, Jeffrey Kelling, Michael Bussmann, Robert Speck +1

We introduce NEOPIC, a framework for learning the field operator in particle-based methods applied to kinetic plasma simulations. Its key novelty is a neural operator that acts directly on the empirical measure of the particles, rather than on a grid, and is evaluated at the particle positions. No mesh or tree is needed and, unlike grid-based neural operators, no deposition onto a mesh takes place, so the particle noise that dominates the inputs of particle simulations is not aliased. Since it replaces only the field solve, it serves as a plug-and-play field solver for particle-based methods: it can be trained on data from particle-in-cell, particle-in-Fourier or tree codes, and combined with any time integrator, including implicit schemes. We prove that the discrete evaluation coincides with the continuous operator at any number of particles (representation equivalence) and derive an error analysis that separates sampling, learning and time-stepping errors: up to the learning error, NEOPIC has the error structure of standard Monte Carlo particle methods. We show that the particle noise in the training data acts as an implicit regularizer, which gives guidance on the number of…