Comparison of Eulerian Vlasov solvers

Vlasov methods, which instead of following the particle trajectories, solve directly the Vlasov equation on a grid of phase space have proven to be an efficient alternative to the Particle-In-Cell method for some specific problems. Such methods are useful, in particular, to obtain high precision in regions where the distribution function is small. Gridded Vlasov methods have the advantage of being completely free of numerical noise, however the discrete formulations contain some other numerical artifacts, like diffusion or dissipation. We shall compare in this paper different types of methods for solving the Vlasov equation on a grid in phase space: the semi-Lagrangian method, the finite volume method, the spectral method, and a method based on a finite difference scheme, conserving exactly several invariants of the system. Moreover, for each of those classes of methods, we shall first compare different interpolation or reconstruction procedures. Then we shall investigate the cost in memory as well as in CPU time which is a very important issue because of the size of the problem defined on the phase space. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.