Abstract: | We prove stability estimates and derive optimal convergence rates for the streamline diffusion and discontinuous Galerkin finite element methods for discretization of the multi‐dimensional Vlasov‐Fokker‐Planck system. The focus is on the theoretical aspects, where we deal with construction and convergence analysis of the discretization schemes. Some related special cases are implemented in M. Asadzadeh [Appl Comput Meth 1(2) (2002), 158–175] and M. Asadzadeh and A. Sopasakis [Comput Meth Appl Mech Eng 191(41–42) (2002), 4641–4661]. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2005 |