Symplectic integration of Hamiltonian wave equations

Summary The numerical integration of a wide class of Hamiltonian partial differential equations by standard symplectic schemes is discussed, with a consistent, Hamiltonian approach. We discretize the Hamiltonian and the Poisson structure separately, then form the the resulting ODE's. The stability, accuracy, and dispersion of different explicit splitting methods are analyzed, and we give the circumstances under which the best results can be obtained; in particular, when the Hamiltonian can be split into linear and nonlinear terms. Many different treatments and examples are compared.