Convergence of finite difference schemes for the Benjamin-Ono equation (Q315705)

This paper deals with the numerical solution of the Benjamin-Ono (BO) equation, which reads the form \[ u_t = u u_x + H u_{xx}, \] where \(H\) denotes the Hilbert transform. The BO equation models the evolution of weakly nonlinear internal long waves. Both the decaying case on the full line and the periodic case are considered. The BO equation is discretized by finite differences and the Crank-Nicolson technique is used for the time derivative. The main result of this paper is the proof of the stability and the convergence of the proposed scheme. Namely, it is shown that if the initial data are sufficiently regular, then the fully discrete finite difference schemes converges to a classical solution. The convergence analysis can be viewed also as a constructive proof for the existence of solutions of the BO equation. Finally, two numerical experiments demonstrating the rate of the convergence are included.