The purpose of this work is to incorporate numerically, in a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) solver of a Boltzmann-Poisson model for hot electron transport, an electronic conduction band whose values are obtained by the spherical averaging of the full band structure given by a local empirical pseudopotential method (EPM) around a local minimum of the conduction band for silicon, as a midpoint between a radial band model and an anisotropic full band, in order to provide a more accurate physical description of the electron group velocity and conduction energy band structure in a semiconductor. This gives a better quantitative description of the transport and collision phenomena that fundamentally define the behaviour of the Boltzmann - Poisson model for electron transport used in this work. The numerical values of the derivatives of this conduction energy band, needed for the description of the electron group velocity, are obtained by means of a cubic spline interpolation. The EPM-Boltzmann-Poisson transport with this spherically averaged EPM calculated energy surface is numerically simulated and compared to the output of traditional analytic band models such as the parabolic and Kane bands, numerically implemented too, for the case of 1D $n^+-n-n^+$ silicon diodes with $400nm$ and $50nm$ channels. Quantitative differences are observed in the kinetic moments related to the conduction energy band used, such as mean velocity, average energy, and electric current (momentum).

We propose an extension of the computational fluid mechanics approach to the Monge-Kantorovich mass transfer problem, which was developed by Benamou-Brenier. Our extension allows optimal transfer of unnormalized and unequal masses. We obtain a one-parameter family of simple modifications of the formulation in [4]. This leads us to a new Monge-Ampere type equation and a new Kantorovich duality formula. These can be solved efficiently by, for example, the Chambolle-Pock primal-dual algorithm. This solution to the extended mass transfer problem gives us a simple metric for computing the distance between two unnormalized densities. The L1 version of this metric was shown in [23] (which is a precursor of our work here) to have desirable properties.

This paper proposes and analyzes arbitrarily high-order discontinuous Galerkin (DG) and finite volume methods which provably preserve the positivity of density and pressure for the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) on general meshes. Unified auxiliary theories are built for rigorously analyzing the positivity-preserving (PP) property of numerical MHD schemes with a Harten–Lax–van Leer (HLL) type flux on polytopal meshes in any space dimension. The main challenges overcome here include establishing certain relation between the PP property and a discrete divergence of magnetic field on general meshes, and estimating proper wave speeds in the HLL flux to ensure the PP property. In the 1D case, we prove that the standard DG and finite volume methods with the proposed HLL flux are PP, under a condition accessible by a PP limiter. For the multidimensional conservative MHD system, the standard DG methods with a PP limiter are not PP in general, due to the effect of unavoidable divergence error in the magnetic field. We construct provably PP high-order DG and finite volume schemes by proper discretization of the symmetrizable MHD system, with two divergence-controlling techniques: the locally divergence-free elements and suitably discretized Godunov–Powell source term. The former technique leads to zero divergence within each cell, while the latter controls the divergence error across cell interfaces. Our analysis reveals in theory that a coupling of these two techniques is very important for positivity preservation, as they exactly contribute the discrete divergence terms which are absent in standard multidimensional DG schemes but crucial for ensuring the PP property. Several numerical tests further confirm the PP property and the effectiveness of the proposed PP schemes. Unlike the conservative MHD system, the exact smooth solutions of the symmetrizable MHD system are proved to retain the positivity even if the divergence-free condition is not satisfied. Our analysis and findings further the understanding, at both discrete and continuous levels, of the relation between the PP property and the divergence-free constraint.

In this paper we introduce a definition of the local conservation property for numerical methods solving time dependent conservation laws, which generalizes the classical local conservation definition. The motivation of our definition is the Lax-Wendroff theorem, and thus we prove it for locally conservative numerical schemes per our definition in one and two space dimensions. Several numerical methods, including continuous Galerkin methods and compact schemes, which do not fit the classical local conservation definition, are given as examples of locally conservative methods under our generalized definition.

The matrix completion problem is to recover a low-rank matrix from a subset of its entries. The main solution strategy for this problem has been based on nuclear-norm minimization which requires computing singular value decompositionsa task that is increasingly costly as matrix sizes and ranks increase. To improve the capacity of solving large-scale problems, we propose a low-rank factorization model and construct a nonlinear successive over-relaxation (SOR) algorithm that only requires solving a linear least squares problem per iteration. Extensive numerical experiments show that the algorithm can reliably solve a wide range of problems at a speed at least several times faster than many nuclear-norm minimization algorithms. In addition, convergence of this nonlinear SOR algorithm to a stationary point is analyzed.