Abstract In plasma edge simulation of a nuclear fusion reactor, a coupled PDE/kinetic description isrequired, which is usually solved with a coupled finite-volume/Monte-Carlo method. Differentprocedures have been proposed to estimate the source terms in the finite volume part that appearfrom the Monte Carlo part of the simulation. In this paper, we present a systematic (analyticaland numerical) comparison of the variance and computational cost of a coherent set of suchestimation procedures. We perform a study of the expected statistical error and computationalcost of these estimation procedures as a function of the model parameters, revealing a non-trivial dependence of the optimal choice of estimator on these parameters. We consider asimulation with realistic scattering and also show the dependence of the optimal estimator onthe problem parameters in this case. We furthermore extend our analysis from mass sourceestimation to momentum source estimation, showing different estimation procedures prevail forboth quantities of interest.
Mortier et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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