Hamilton-Pontryagin integrators on Lie groups. I: Introduction and structure-preserving properties (Q1022434)

The authors discuss the numerical integration of the equations of motion of mechanical systems with a Lie group as configuration space. They propose to construct efficient and structure preserving integrators by discretising the Hamilton-Pontryagin action integral of the system using the coefficients of a Runge-Kutta method. In order to extend this approach to Lie groups, they use a left trivialised form of the action. The result is a novel class of variational partitioned Runge-Kutta methods on Lie groups which includes generalisations of the symplectic Euler and the Störmer-Verlet methods on flat spaces.