Modified equations for variational integrators (Q1681795)

The author develops a method to construct modified Lagrangians, starting from the discrete Lagrangian of the numerical method. These modified Lagrangians produce the modified equation up to an error of arbitrarily high order in the step size. The construction consists of several steps and requires the introduction of some analytic concepts such as meshed variational problems, where an extremizer is sought in a class of curves that may be nondifferentiable at some points, and \(k\)-critical families of curves, which are families of curves that almost extremize the action. Several examples are presented in order to support the efficiency of the method.