The numerical approximation of center manifolds in Hamiltonian systems

In this paper we develop a numerical method for computing higher order local approximations of center manifolds near steady states in Hamiltonian systems. The underlying system is assumed to be large in the sense that a large sparse Jacobian at the equilibrium occurs, for which only a linear solver and a low-dimensional invariant subspace is available. Our method combines this restriction from linear algebra with the requirement that the center manifold is parametrized by a symplectic mapping and that the reduced equation preserves the Hamiltonian form. Our approach can be considered as a special adaptation of a general method from Numer. Math. 80 (1998) 1-38 to the Hamiltonian case such that approximations of the reduced Hamiltonian are obtained simultaneously. As an application we treat a finite difference system for an elliptic problem on an infinite strip.