Geometric integration of non-autonomous linear Hamiltonian problems (Q273661)

The authors make use of some canonical transformations designed for time-dependent systems in order to extend symplectic integrators for autonomous systems to non-autonomous ones. They carry out a lot of numerical experiments on a non-autonomous problem which can be viewed as a small perturbation of an autonomous one exhibiting bounded energy (the usual harmonic oscillator). For this problem they notice the long time performance of some integrators such as the symmetric 4th Magnus method based on two stage Gauss-Legendre quadrature, some canonical and/or symmetric integrators, as well as exponential methods. It seems that the canonic and symmetric exponential integrators have better long time behavior (conservation accuracy) than any other numerical integrators.