Numerically induced phase shift in the KdV soliton (Q1208837)

Comparing the numerical results from the Zabusky-Kruskal scheme with the following Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) soliton \(u(x,t)=2\eta^ 2\text{sech}^ 2\eta(x-4\eta^ 2t)\), the authors find that all of the features of the KdV soliton are accurate with the exception of the soliton center. They retain the lowest order terms in the truncation error and treat them analytically as a perturbation of the KdV equation and show that the discretization error for the Zabusky-Kruskal scheme does account for the numerically induced phase shift. A byproduct of this study is a simple modification of the Zabusky-Kruskal scheme, which can be implemented in the same amount of time with more accurate results.