A class of efficient spectral methods and error analysis for nonlinear Hamiltonian systems (Q2658904)

Three polynomial spectral methods with high-order (spectral) accuracy are developed for nonlinear Hamiltonian systems: spectral Petrov-Galerkin, spectral Gauss collocation, and spectral Galerkin methods. The Petrov-Galerkin method preserves the energy exactly, while both Gauss collocation and spectral Galerkin methods are energy conserving up to numerically negligible error terms and both spectral Galerkin and Petrov-Galerkin methods have spectral accuracy in symplectic structure error. The global error decays exponentially with respect to the polynomial degree under some regularity assumption. Comparing with existing symplectic methods and low-order Galerkin methods, the methods developed in this paper preserve energy and symplectic structure in practice, especially, the Petrov-Galerkin method preserves the energy exactly Due to the spectral accuracy, the three spectral methods preserve the energy and symplectic structure in numerical experiments up to machine error with reasonable computational cost.