English

Hypocoercivity for Linear ODEs and Strong Stability for Runge--Kutta Methods

Numerical Analysis 2023-10-31 v1 Numerical Analysis

Abstract

In this note, we connect two different topics from linear algebra and numerical analysis: hypocoercivity of semi-dissipative matrices and strong stability for explicit Runge--Kutta schemes. Linear autonomous ODE systems with a non-coercive matrix are called hypocoercive if they still exhibit uniform exponential decay towards the steady state. Strong stability is a property of time-integration schemes for ODEs that preserve the temporal monotonicity of the discrete solutions. It is proved that explicit Runge--Kutta schemes are strongly stable with respect to semi-dissipative, asymptotically stable matrices if the hypocoercivity index is sufficiently small compared to the order of the scheme. Otherwise, the Runge--Kutta schemes are in general not strongly stable. As a corollary, explicit Runge--Kutta schemes of order p4Np\in 4\N with s=ps=p stages turn out to be \emph{not} strongly stable. This result was proved in \cite{AAJ23}, filling a gap left open in \cite{SunShu19}. Here, we present an alternative, direct proof.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.19758,
  title  = {Hypocoercivity for Linear ODEs and Strong Stability for Runge--Kutta Methods},
  author = {Franz Achleitner and Anton Arnold and Ansgar Jüngel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.19758},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:06:15.479Z