A conservative semi-Lagrangian HWENO method for the Vlasov equation

Abstract: In this paper, we present a high order conservative semi-Lagrangian (SL) Hermite weighted essentially non-oscillatory (HWENO) method for the Vlasov equation based on dimensional splitting [Cheng and Knorr, Journal of Computational Physics, 22(1976)]. The major advantage of HWENO reconstruction, compared with the original WENO reconstruction, is compact. For the split one-dimensional equation, to ensure local mass conservation, we propose a high order SL HWENO scheme in a conservative flux-difference form, following the work in [J.-M. Qiu and A. Christlieb, Journal of Computational Physics, v229(2010)]. Besides performing dimensional splitting for the original 2D problem, we design a proper splitting for equations of derivatives to ensure local mass conservation of the proposed HWENO scheme. The proposed fifth order SL HWENO scheme with the Eulerian CFL condition has been tested to work well in capturing filamentation structures without introducing oscillations. We introduce WENO limiters to control oscillations when the time stepping size is larger than the Eulerian CFL restriction. We perform classical numerical tests on rigid body rotation problem, and demonstrate the performance of our scheme via the Landau damping and two-stream instabilities when solving the Vlasov-Poisson system.