Challenges in geometric numerical integration
Ernst Hairer
Abstract. Geometric Numerical Integration is a subfield of the numerical treatment of differential equations. It deals with the design and analysis of algorithms that preserve the structure of the analytic flow. The present review discusses numerical integrators, which nearly preserve the energy of Hamiltonian systems over long times. Backward error analysis gives important insight in the situation, where the product of the step size with the highest frequency is small. Modulated Fourier expansions permit to treat nonlinearly perturbed fast oscillators. A big challenge that remains is to get insight into the long-time behavior of numerical integrators for fully nonlinear oscillatory problems, where the product of the step size with the highest frequency is not small.
Key Words. Geometric numerical integration, energy preservation.