Preserving Poisson structure and orthogonality in numerical integration of differential equations (Q1767932)

The author studies a geometric integrator for Hamiltonian systems for arbitrary Poisson structures and for orthogonal or isospectral flows. He first shows (via a linear transformation to Darboux coordinates) that the well-known conditions for symplectic Runge-Kutta methods also ensure that arbitrary Poisson structures with a constant Poisson tensor are preserved. For non-constant Poisson tensors he proposes to apply a symplectic integrator to the implicit system obtained after a nonlinear transformation to a system with a constant Poisson tensor and then to transform back to the original coordinates. As a concrete example the Euler equations for the free rigid body are considered. In the second part of the paper orthogonal and isospectral flows are treated. The emphasis is on the former ones, as the latter ones can always be reduced to them. The author presents an approach using only matrix-matrix products (which is thus particularly interesting for parallel computations) based on a formulation of the problem as differential algebraic equation with the orthogonality conditions as constraints. Again the free rigid body is used as test problem together with the Toda lattice.