English

Contact variational integrators

Numerical Analysis 2019-11-04 v4 Numerical Analysis Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We present geometric numerical integrators for contact flows that stem from a discretization of Herglotz' variational principle. First we show that the resulting discrete map is a contact transformation and that any contact map can be derived from a variational principle. Then we discuss the backward error analysis of our variational integrators, including the construction of a modified Lagrangian. Throughout the paper we use the damped harmonic oscillator as a benchmark example to compare our integrators to their symplectic analogues.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.00436,
  title  = {Contact variational integrators},
  author = {Mats Vermeeren and Alessandro Bravetti and Marcello Seri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.00436},
  year   = {2019}
}