Particle Method for the Vlasov-Poisson System

We present a semi-Lagrangian particle method (SLPM) for the Vlasov-Poisson system in which the electric field is obtained by summing pairwise particle interactions rather than the usual particle-in-cell (PIC) approach. The aim is to achieve higher accuracy and less noise than PIC, while still providing an efficient representation of phase space using an adaptive particle distribution and treecode acceleration. We compare SLPM with a standard PIC code and an Eulerian Vlasov code for several test cases.