Positivity preserving semi-Lagrangian discontinuous Galerkin formulation: Theoretical analysis and application to the Vlasov-Poisson system

Semi-Lagrangian (SL) methods have been very popular in the Vlasov simulation community [28, 2, 3, 18, 31, 4, 23, 25]. In this paper, we propose a new Strang split SL discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for solving the Vlasov equation. Specifically, we apply the Strang splitting for the Vlasov equation [5], as a way to decouple the nonlinear Vlasov system into a sequence of linear equations. To evolve the decoupled linear equations, we propose to couple the SL framework with the semi-discrete DG formulation. The proposed SL DG method is free of time step restriction compared with the Runge-Kutta DG method, which is known to suffer from numerical time step limitation with relatively small CFL numbers according to linear stability analysis. We apply the recently developed positivity preserving (PP) limiter [36], which is a low-cost black box procedure, to our scheme to ensure the positivity of the unknown probability density function without affecting the high order accuracy of the base SL DG scheme. We analyze the stability and accuracy properties of the SL DG scheme by establishing its connection with the direct and weak formulations of the characteristics/Lagrangian Galerkin method [22]. The quality of the proposed method is demonstrated via basic test problems, such as linear advection and rigid body rotation, and via classical plasma problems, such as Landau damping and the two stream instability.