The Lie group structure of the Butcher group (Q525601)

The Butcher group is a powerful tool to analyse integration methods for ordinary differential equations, in particular Runge-Kutta methods. The theory of the Butcher group developed in the literature is mainly algebraic in nature. In this paper the authors investigate the Lie theoretic properties of the Butcher group. Let us recall the definition of the Butcher group. A rooted tree is a connected finite graph without cycles with a distinguished node called the root. Denote by \(\mathcal{T}\) the set of all rooted trees with a finite positive number of vertices. Furthermore, let \(\emptyset\) be the empty tree. Then the (real) Butcher group is defined to be the set of all tree maps which map the empty tree to \(1\), i.e.\ \(G_{\text{TM}} = \{a : \mathcal{T} \cup \{\emptyset \} \rightarrow \mathbb{R} \mid a (\emptyset) = 1\}\). To define the group operation, one interprets the values of a tree map as coefficients of a (formal) power series. In the present paper, the authors complement the algebraic treatment of the Butcher group \(G_{\text{TM}}\) with a natural infinite-dimensional Lie group structure modelled on the Fréchet space \(\mathbb{R}^{\mathcal{T}}\). This structure turns the Butcher group into a real analytic Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff Lie group. In addition, the Butcher group is a regular Lie group in the sense of Milnor and contains the subgroup of symplectic tree maps as a closed Lie subgroup. Finally, the authors also compute the Lie algebra of the Butcher group and discuss its relation to the Lie algebra associated to the Butcher group by Connes and Kreimer.