Generating Functionals and Lagrangian PDEs

We introduce the concept of Type-I/II generating functionals defined on the space of boundary data of a Lagrangian field theory. On the Lagrangian side, we define an analogue of Jacobi's solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation for field theories, and we show that by taking variational derivatives of this functional, we obtain an isotropic submanifold of the space of Cauchy data, described by the so-called multisymplectic form formula. We also define a Hamiltonian analogue of Jacobi's solution, and we show that this functional is a Type-II generating functional. We finish the paper by defining a similar framework of generating functions for discrete field theories, and we show that for the linear wave equation, we recover the multisymplectic conservation law of Bridges.Comment: 31 pages; 1 figure -- v2: minor change

Nonstandard Finite Difference Variational Integrators for Multisymplectic PDEs

We use the idea of nonstandard finite difference methods to derive the discrete variational integrators for multisymplectic PDEs. We obtain a nonstandard finite difference variational integrator for linear wave equation with a triangle discretization and two nonstandard finite difference variational integrators for the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation with a triangle discretization and a square discretization, respectively. These methods are naturally multisymplectic. Their discrete multisymplectic structures are presented by the multisymplectic form formulas. The convergence of the discretization schemes is discussed. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods are verified by the numerical experiments