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Intermittent Sub-grid Wave Correction from Differentiated Riemann Variables

Computational Physics 2026-03-24 v1

Abstract

We introduce a low-cost every-KK-step correction for one-dimensional Euler computations. The correction uses differentiated Riemann variables (DRVs) -- characteristic derivatives that isolate the left acoustic wave, the contact, and the right acoustic wave -- to locate the current wave packet, sample the surrounding constant states, perform a short Newton update for the intermediate pressure and contact speed, and conservatively remap a sharpened profile back onto the grid. The ingredients are elementary -- filtered centered differences, local state sampling, a single Newton step, and conservative cell averaging -- yet the effect on accuracy is disproportionate. On a long-time severe-expansion benchmark (N=900N=900, t=0.4t=0.4), intermittent correction drives the intermediate-state errors from O(102)O(10^{-2}) to O(1013)O(10^{-13}), i.e. to machine precision. On a long-time LeBlanc benchmark (N=800N=800, t=1t=1), the method crosses a qualitative threshold: one-shot final-time reconstruction fails entirely (shock location error 2.7×1012.7\times 10^{-1}), whereas correction every three steps recovers an almost exact sharp solution with contact and shock positions accurate to machine precision. The same detector-and-Newton mechanism handles two-shock and two-rarefaction packets without case-specific logic, with plateau improvements of four to sixteen orders of magnitude. In an unoptimized Python prototype the wall-clock overhead is below a factor of two even on the most aggressively corrected benchmark. To our knowledge, no comparably lightweight fixed-grid add-on has been shown to recover this level of coarse-grid accuracy on the long-time LeBlanc and related near-vacuum problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.22084,
  title  = {Intermittent Sub-grid Wave Correction from Differentiated Riemann Variables},
  author = {Steve Shkoller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.22084},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:33:30.544Z