Conservation of energy, momentum and actions in numerical discretizations of non-linear wave equations

Journal article, 2008

For classes of symplectic and symmetric time-stepping methods- trigonometric integrators and the Störmer-Verlet or leapfrog method-applied to spectral semi-discretizations of semilinear wave equations in a weakly non-linear setting, it is shown that energy, momentum, and all harmonic actions are approximately preserved over long times. For the case of interest where the CFL number is not a small parameter, such results are outside the reach of standard backward error analysis. Here, they are instead obtained via a modulated Fourier expansion in time.