On a class of modified Cayley--Magnus methods

Abstract

We introduce a new class of numerical integrators for the time integration of non-autonomous linear ordinary differential equations whose coefficient matrix is sparse and evolves within a quadratic matrix Lie group. In contrast to standard Lie group integrators, the proposed methods avoid the evaluation of matrix exponentials acting on vectors and instead rely on solving a sequence of linear systems with sparse coefficient matrices. Moreover, they are well suited for problems arising from unbounded operators, as they inherently produce bounded solutions. We construct optimised schemes of orders four and six and assess their performance on a representative numerical example, demonstrating clear advantages over existing Lie-group integrators.