Comparison of two Eulerian solvers for the four-dimensional Vlasov equation: Part I

Abstract In this second part, we carry out a numerical comparison between two Vlasov solvers, which solve directly the Vlasov equation on a grid of the phase space. The two methods are based on the semi-Lagrangian method as presented in Part I: the first one (LOSS, local splines simulator) uses a uniform mesh of the phase space whereas the second one (OBI, ondelets based interpolation) is an adaptive method. The numerical comparisons are performed by solving the four-dimensional Vlasov equation for some classical problems of plasma and beam physics. We shall also investigate the speedup and the CPU time as well as the compression rate of the adaptive method which are important features because of the size of the problems.