A conservative low rank tensor method for the Vlasov dynamics

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a conservative low rank tensor method to approximate nonlinear Vlasov solutions. The low rank approach is based on our earlier work (arxiv: 2106.08834). It takes advantage of the fact that the differential operators in the Vlasov equation are tensor friendly, based on which we propose to dynamically and adaptively build up low rank solution basis by adding new basis functions from discretization of the differential equation, and removing basis from a singular value decomposition (SVD)-type truncation procedure. For the discretization, we adopt a high order finite difference spatial discretization together with a second order strong stability preserving multi-step time discretization. While the SVD truncation will remove the redundancy in representing the high dimensional Vlasov solution, it will destroy the conservation properties of the associated full conservative scheme. In this paper, we develop a conservative truncation procedure with conservation of mass, momentum and kinetic energy densities. The conservative truncation is achieved by an orthogonal projection onto a subspace spanned by $1$, $v$ and $v^2$ in the velocity space associated with a weighted inner product. Then the algorithm performs a weighted SVD truncation of the remainder, which involves a scaling, followed by the standard SVD truncation and rescaling back. The algorithm is further developed in high dimensions with hierarchical Tucker tensor decomposition of high dimensional Vlasov solutions, overcoming the curse of dimensionality. An extensive set of nonlinear Vlasov examples are performed to show the effectiveness and conservation property of proposed conservative low rank approach. Comparison is performed against the non-conservative low rank tensor approach on conservation history of mass, momentum and energy.