Runge-Kutta smoother for suppression of computational-mode instability of leapfrog scheme (Q5919272)

The authors discuss numerical results obtained for numerical integration of the initial value problem for the Korteweg-de Vries equation \(u_ t+uu_ x+\mu u_{xxx}=0.\) The leapfrog scheme applied to this problem is demonstrated to lead to instabilities for initial data of large amplitude. An analysis of this scheme for the linearized problem obtained by replacing \(uu_ x\) by \(cu_ x\) is shown to yield ``physical modes'' and ``computational modes'' and it is the suppression of these computational modes the authors address by introduction of a (smoothing) Runge-Kutta integration step.