Enhancing Energy Conserving Methods

Recent observations [5] indicate that energy-momentum methods might be better suited for the numerical integration of highly oscillatory Hamiltonian systems than implicit symplectic methods. However, the popular energy-momentum method, suggested in [3], achieves conservation of energy by a global scaling of the force field. This leads to an undesirable coupling of all degrees of freedom that is not present in the original problem formulation. We suggest enhancing this energy-momentum method by splitting the force field and using separate adjustment factors for each force. In case that the potential energy function can be split into a strong and a weak part, we also show how to combine an energy conserving discretization of the strong forces with a symplectic discretization of the weak contributions. We demonstrate the numerical properties of our method by integrating particles that interact through Lennard-Jones potentials. Keywords: Hamiltonian differential equations, energy-momentum..