A semi-Lagrangian Vlasov solver in tensor train format

In this article, we derive a semi-Lagrangian scheme for the solution of the Vlasov equation represented as a low-parametric tensor. Grid-based methods for the Vlasov equation have been shown to give accurate results but their use has mostly been limited to simulations in two dimensional phase space due to extensive memory requirements in higher dimensions. Compression of the solution via high-order singular value decomposition can help in reducing the storage requirements and the tensor train (TT) format provides efficient basic linear algebra routines for low-rank representations of tensors. In this paper, we develop interpolation formulas for a semi-Lagrangian solver in TT format. In order to efficiently implement the method, we propose a compression of the matrix representing the interpolation step and an efficient implementation of the Hadamard product. We show numerical simulations for standard test cases in two, four and six dimensional phase space. Depending on the test case, the memory requirements reduce by a factor $10^2-10^3$ in four and a factor $10^5-10^6$ in six dimensions compared to the full-grid method.