Splitting and composition methods in the numerical integration of differential equations

We provide a comprehensive survey of splitting and composition methods for the numerical integration of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Splitting methods constitute an appropriate choice when the vector field associated with the ODE can be decomposed into several pieces and each of them is integrable. This class of integrators are explicit, simple to implement and preserve structural properties of the system. In consequence, they are specially useful in geometric numerical integration. In addition, the numerical solution obtained by splitting schemes can be seen as the exact solution to a perturbed system of ODEs possessing the same geometric properties as the original system. This backward error interpretation has direct implications for the qualitative behavior of the numerical solution as well as for the error propagation along time. Closely connected with splitting integrators are composition methods. We analyze the order conditions required by a method to achieve a given order and summarize the different families of schemes one can find in the literature. Finally, we illustrate the main features of splitting and composition methods on several numerical examples arising from applications.Comment: Review paper; 56 pages, 6 figures, 8 table

Exotic aromatic B-series for the study of long time integrators for a class of ergodic SDEs

We introduce a new algebraic framework based on a modification (called exotic) of aromatic Butcher-series for the systematic study of the accuracy of numerical integrators for the invariant measure of a class of ergodic stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with additive noise. The proposed analysis covers Runge-Kutta type schemes including the cases of partitioned methods and postprocessed methods. We also show that the introduced exotic aromatic B-series satisfy an isometric equivariance property.Comment: 33 page

The Magnus expansion and some of its applications

Approximate resolution of linear systems of differential equations with varying coefficients is a recurrent problem shared by a number of scientific and engineering areas, ranging from Quantum Mechanics to Control Theory. When formulated in operator or matrix form, the Magnus expansion furnishes an elegant setting to built up approximate exponential representations of the solution of the system. It provides a power series expansion for the corresponding exponent and is sometimes referred to as Time-Dependent Exponential Perturbation Theory. Every Magnus approximant corresponds in Perturbation Theory to a partial re-summation of infinite terms with the important additional property of preserving at any order certain symmetries of the exact solution. The goal of this review is threefold. First, to collect a number of developments scattered through half a century of scientific literature on Magnus expansion. They concern the methods for the generation of terms in the expansion, estimates of the radius of convergence of the series, generalizations and related non-perturbative expansions. Second, to provide a bridge with its implementation as generator of especial purpose numerical integration methods, a field of intense activity during the last decade. Third, to illustrate with examples the kind of results one can expect from Magnus expansion in comparison with those from both perturbative schemes and standard numerical integrators. We buttress this issue with a revision of the wide range of physical applications found by Magnus expansion in the literature.Comment: Report on the Magnus expansion for differential equations and its applications to several physical problem

Efficient integration of the variational equations of multi-dimensional Hamiltonian systems: Application to the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattice

We study the problem of efficient integration of variational equations in multi-dimensional Hamiltonian systems. For this purpose, we consider a Runge-Kutta-type integrator, a Taylor series expansion method and the so-called `Tangent Map' (TM) technique based on symplectic integration schemes, and apply them to the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam $\beta$ (FPU-$\beta$) lattice of $N$ nonlinearly coupled oscillators, with $N$ ranging from 4 to 20. The fast and accurate reproduction of well-known behaviors of the Generalized Alignment Index (GALI) chaos detection technique is used as an indicator for the efficiency of the tested integration schemes. Implementing the TM technique--which shows the best performance among the tested algorithms--and exploiting the advantages of the GALI method, we successfully trace the location of low-dimensional tori.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure