Composition methods, Maxwell's equations, and source terms (Q2902996)

The paper concerns high-order numerical time integration of systems of first-order wave equations arising from spatial discretization of Maxwell's equations. The author studies the accuracy of high-order composition methods in the presence of source functions that could be physical sources or source functions from Dirichlet boundary conditions. The author considers two fourth-order symmetric compositions. In the PDE setting of semidiscrete systems, the convergence order may be even two orders lower that the chosen composition order due to the presence of source terms. The author proposes a perturbation of the source function that increases the general order by one, specifically, if the source contains Dirichlet boundary data the order is at least two without the perturbation and at least three with it. If boundary data is absent the order is at least three without the perturbation and four with it. Some numerical tests illustrate the theoretical results.