Low-variance Monte Carlo Solutions of the Boltzmann Transport Equation

We present and discuss a variance-reduced stochastic particle method for simulating the relaxation-time model of the Boltzmann transport equation. The present paper focuses on the dilute gas case, although the method is expected to directly extend to all fields (carriers) for which the relaxation-time approximation is reasonable. The variance reduction, achieved by simulating only the deviation from equilibrium, results in a significant computational efficiency advantage compared to traditional stochastic particle methods in the limit of small deviation from equilibrium. More specifically, the proposed method can efficiently simulate arbitrarily small deviations from equilibrium at a computational cost that is independent of the deviation from equilibrium, which is in sharp contrast to traditional particle methods.