Fourth Order Conservative Exponential Methods for Linear Evolution Equations

A few numerical methods for linear evolution equations are developed and analyzed in this paper. These fourth order exponential methods reproduce the exact solutions for equations with time-independent evolution operators. For highly oscillatory problems with evolution operators that vary slowly in time, these methods are often more efficient than the traditional methods, since large step sizes can be used. The methods developed in this paper are also conservative for equations such as the Schrödinger equation, where the evolution operator is skew-selfadjoint.