  We propose a novel deterministic particle method to numerically approximate
the Landau equation for plasmas. Based on a new variational formulation in
terms of gradient flows of the Landau equation, we regularize the collision
operator to make sense of the particle solutions. These particle solutions
solve a large coupled ODE system that retains all the important properties of
the Landau operator, namely the conservation of mass, momentum and energy, and
the decay of entropy. We illustrate our new method by showing its performance
in several test cases including the physically relevant case of the Coulomb
interaction. The comparison to the exact solution and the spectral method is
strikingly good maintaining 2nd order accuracy. Moreover, an efficient
implementation of the method via the treecode is explored. This gives a proof
of concept for the practical use of our method when coupled with the classical
PIC method for the Vlasov equation.
