Geometric integration of the paraxial equation (Q426318)

This paper is concerned with the numerical integration of the propagation of 1-dimensional solitary waves that arise in a photovoltaic-photoreactive crystal described by the so-called paraxial equation. It is shown that after suitable normalization the problem can be described by means of an unknown complex function \( u = u(x,t)\equiv p(x,t) + i q(x,t)\) depending on the spatial variable \(x\) and time \(t\) that satisfies the differential equation: \[ i \; u_t + (1/2) \; u_{xx} - ( \alpha + \beta ) \; u \; ( 1 + | u|^2)^{-1} + \alpha \; u = 0,\tag{1} \] where the photovoltaic field \( \alpha\) and the applied electric field \( \beta \) are given constants. By introducing the new variable \( z = ( q, p)^T\) it is shown that (1) can be written as a Hamiltonian system with the density Hamiltonian function \( H = (1/4) ( p_x^2 + q_x^2) + \left( ( \alpha + \beta )/2 \right) \log \left( 1+ ( p^2 + q^2)\right) - ( \alpha /2) ( p^2 + q^2)\). Now after a suitable finite difference spatial discretization in a uniform spatial grid it is proved that the mid point rule is a symplectic time advancing scheme that preserves the discrete Hamiltonian. A number of numerical experiments for solitonic solutions with different values of parameters \( \alpha\) and \( \beta\) and Gaussian type initial conditions are presented to show the conservative behaviour of the proposed scheme.