Mass- and energy-conserving Gauss collocation methods for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a wave operator (Q6063017)

The paper focuses on the numerical solution of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation that involves a wave operator and is subject to periodic boundary conditions. The authors use a scalar auxiliary variable approach to reformulate the equation and propose a method, which is a combination of the Gauss collocation method with elements of degree \(k\) used for time discretization and the finite element method with elements of degree \(p\) used for spatial discretization. The discretization scheme leads to a system of nonlinear equations, which is solved by Newton's method. The proposed method is rigorously analyzed. The authors show that the method is consistent and preserves mass and energy, and prove the existence and uniqueness of the numerical solution. Furthermore, using Schaefer's fixed point theorem, they prove that the convergence is of order \(\mathcal{O} \left( h^p + \tau^{k+1} \right)\) with respect to \(L^{\infty} \left( 0, T; H^1 \right)\) norm without any grid-ratio conditions between the spatial step \(h\) and the time step \(\tau\). Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical results, namely that the method is higher-order convergent and preserves mass and energy. Moreover, they show that the number of Newton's iterations required to solve the nonlinear system is small.