A Mass, Momentum, and Energy Conserving Semi-Lagrangian Adaptive-Rank (SLAR) Method for the Vlasov-Poisson System

Abstract

We propose a semi-Lagrangian adaptive-rank (SLAR) method that combines the large time-step capability of semi-Lagrangian schemes with the efficiency of adaptive-rank tensor representations while simultaneously enforcing local conservation laws for mass, momentum, and energy. The method builds on the high-dimensional SLAR framework introduced in our previous work and achieves high-order accuracy in both space and time. To address the loss of conservation in long-time simulations, we extend the implicit local macroscopic conservative (LoMaC) correction technique for the BGK equation to the high-dimensional Vlasov--Poisson (VP) system. The implicit macroscopic system is discretized using backward differentiation formulas and solved with a Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov method. This approach enables a consistent coupling with semi-Lagrangian methods which are capable of taking large time steps. A novel component of the proposed method is a unified adaptive-weight projection technique that eliminates the ad hoc parameter tuning required by previous LoMaC approaches. These weights capture problem-dependent velocity space structures and are constructed from the low-rank velocity bases of the solution. The local semi-Lagrangian method used in this work reconstructs the solution at the feet of the characteristics using efficient tensor contractions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful implementation of an implicit LoMaC method for the VP system up to the 2D--2V setting. Numerical experiments on several classical benchmark problems demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method, as well as its ability to preserve conservation laws in VP simulations.