Numerical integrators that contract volume (Q1567644)

The paper deals with numerical integrators that contract phase space volume. For strongly contractive systems any consistent numerical integrator is contractive for small enough step \(h\). Therefore, the authors study week contraction which is a closed property although more difficult to preserve. First they examine two-dimensional systems and demonstrate that Euler's method is not contractive in two dimensions. Then it is proved that the midpoint rule and the symplectic Runge-Kutta methods with \(b_i>0\) are contractive in two dimensions. For higher-dimensional systems, a given ordinary differential equation is first written as a sum of two-dimensional contractive systems. Then a contractive method is applied to each term, and the resulting maps are composed with positive time steps.