A note on the integrable discretization of the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation

Abstract

We revisit integrable discretizations for the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation due to Ablowitz and Ladik. We demonstrate how their main drawback, the non-locality, can be overcome. Namely, we factorize the non-local difference scheme into the product of local ones. This must improve the performance of the scheme in the numerical computations dramatically. Using the equivalence of the Ablowitz--Ladik and the relativistic Toda hierarchies, we find the interpolating Hamiltonians for the local schemes and show how to solve them in terms of matrix factorizations.