Section: Research Program
Structure-preserving numerical schemes for solving ordinary differential equations
Participants : François Castella, Philippe Chartier, Erwan Faou.
ordinary differential equation, numerical integrator, invariant, Hamiltonian system, reversible system, Lie-group system
In many physical situations, the time-evolution of certain quantities may be written as a Cauchy problem for a differential equation of the form
For a given
This question can be more specifically addressed in the following situations:
Reversible ODEs
The system (1) is said to be
It is then natural to require that
ODEs with an invariant manifold
The system (1) is said to have an invariant manifold
is kept globally invariant by
As an example, we mention Lie-group equations, for which the manifold has an additional group
structure. This could possibly be exploited for the space-discretisation.
Numerical methods amenable to this sort of problems have been
reviewed in a recent paper [48] and divided into two
classes, according to whether they use
Hamiltonian systems
Hamiltonian problems are ordinary differential equations of the form:
with some prescribed initial values
Besides the Hamiltonian function, there might exist other invariants for
such systems: when there exist
where
A continuously differentiable map
A fundamental property of Hamiltonian systems is that their exact flow is symplectic. Integrable Hamiltonian systems behave in a very remarkable way: as a matter of fact, their invariants persist under small perturbations, as shown in the celebrated theory of Kolmogorov, Arnold and Moser. This behavior motivates the introduction of symplectic numerical flows that share most of the properties of the exact flow. For practical simulations of Hamiltonian systems, symplectic methods possess an important advantage: the error-growth as a function of time is indeed linear, whereas it would typically be quadratic for non-symplectic methods.
Differential-algebraic equations
Whenever the number of differential equations is insufficient to determine the solution of the system, it may become necessary to solve the differential part and the constraint part altogether. Systems of this sort are called differential-algebraic systems. They can be classified according to their index, yet for the purpose of this expository section, it is enough to present the so-called index-2 systems
where initial values
and of the so-called hidden manifold
This manifold
There exists a whole set of schemes which provide a numerical approximation lying on