Long-time behaviour of discretizations of the simple pendulum equation

Abstract

We compare several discretizations of the simple pendulum equation in a series of numerical experiments. The stress is put on the long-time behaviour. The chosen numerical schemes are either symplectic maps or integrable (energy-preserving) maps, or both. Therefore, they preserve qualitative features of solutions (such as periodicity). We describe characteristic periodic time dependences of numerical estimates of the period and the amplitude, and explain them as systematic numerical by-effects produced by any method. Finally, we propose a new numerical scheme which is a modification of the discrete gradient method. This modified discrete gradient method preserves (almost exactly) the period of small oscillations for any time step.