Published August 29, 1995 | Version public
Journal Article

The rate of error growth in Hamiltonian-conserving integrators

  • 1. ROR icon Georgia Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Stanford University

Abstract

In this note, we consider numerical methods for a class of Hamiltonian systems that preserve the Hamiltonian. We show that the rate of growth of error is at most linear in time when such methods are applied to problems with period uniquely determined by the value of the Hamiltonian. This contrasts to generic numerical schemes, for which the rate of error growth is superlinear. Asymptotically, the rate of error growth for symplectic schemes is also linear. Hence, Hamiltonian-conserving schemes are competitive with symplectic schemes in this respect. The theory is illustrated with a computation performed on Kepler's problem for the interaction of two bodies.

Additional Information

© 1995 Birkhäuser Verlag. Received: August 29, 1994; revised: December 13, 1994. The work of D. J. Estep is supported by the National Science Foundation, contract numbers DMS-9208684 and INT-9302016. The work of A. M. Stuart is supported by the Office of Naval Research, contract number N00014-92-J-1876 and by the National Science Foundation, contract number DMS-9201727. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions, particularly for drawing our attention to the result and proof outlined in Important Remark (iii).

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
78159
DOI
10.1007/BF01003559
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20170613-104839336

Funding

NSF
DMS-9208684
NSF
INT-9302016
Office of Naval Research (ONR)
N00014-92-J-1876
NSF
DMS-9201727

Dates

Created
2017-06-13
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-15
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Other Numbering System Name
Andrew Stuart
Other Numbering System Identifier
J30