In this paper, we propose the parametrized maximum principle preserving (MPP)
flux limiter, originally developed in [Z. Xu, Math. Comp., (2013), in press],
to the semi- Lagrangian finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory
scheme for solving the Vlasov equation. The MPP flux limiter is proved to
maintain up to fourth order accuracy for the semi-Lagrangian finite difference
scheme without any time step restriction. Numerical studies on the
Vlasov-Poisson system demonstrate the performance of the proposed method and
its ability in preserving the positivity of the probability distribution
function while maintaining the high order accuracy