An adaptive time-stepping Fourier pseudo-spectral method for the Zakharov-Rubenchik equation

Abstract

An adaptive time-stepping scheme is developed for the Zakharov-Rubenchik system to resolve the multiple time scales accurately and to improve the computational efficiency during long-time simulations. The Crank-Nicolson formula and the Fourier pseudo-spectral method are respectively utilized for the temporal and spatial approximations. The proposed numerical method is proved to preserve the mass and energy conservative laws in the discrete levels exactly so that the magnetic field, the density of mass, and the fluid speed are stable on a general class of nonuniform time meshes. With the aid of the priori estimates derived from the discrete invariance and the newly proved discrete Gronwall inequality on variable time grids, sharp convergence analysis of the fully discrete scheme is established rigorously. Error estimate shows that the suggested adaptive time-stepping method can attain the second-order accuracy in time and the spectral accuracy in space. Extensive numerical experiments coupled with an adaptive time-stepping algorithm are presented to show the effectiveness of our numerical method in capturing the multiple time scale evolution for various velocity cases during the interactions of solitons.