Third-order symplectic integration method with inverse time dispersion transform for long-term simulation

The symplectic integration method is popular in high-accuracy numerical simulations when discretizing temporal derivatives; however, it still suffers from time-dispersion error when the temporal interval is coarse, especially for long-term simulations and large-scale models. We employ the inverse time dispersion transform (ITDT) to the third-order symplectic integration method to reduce the time-dispersion error. First, we adopt the pseudospectral algorithm for the spatial discretization and the third-order symplectic integration method for the temporal discretization. Then, we apply the ITDT to eliminate time-dispersion error from the synthetic data. As a post-processing method, the ITDT can be easily cascaded in traditional numerical simulations. We implement the ITDT in one typical exiting third-order symplectic scheme and compare its performances with the performances of the conventional second-order scheme and the rapid expansion method. Theoretical analyses and numerical experiments show that the ITDT can significantly reduce the time-dispersion error, especially for long travel times. The implementation of the ITDT requires some additional computations on correcting the time-dispersion error, but it allows us to use the maximum temporal interval under stability conditions; thus, its final computational efficiency would be higher than that of the traditional symplectic integration method for long-term simulations. With the aid of the ITDT, we can obtain much more accurate simulation results but with a lower computational cost.