Symmetric high order Gautschi-type exponential wave integrators pseudospectral method for the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation in the nonrelativistic limit regime

Abstract: A group of high order Gautschi-type exponential wave integrators (EWIs) Fourier pseudospectral method are proposed and analyzed for solving the nonlinear Klein-Gordon equation (KGE) in the nonrelativistic limit regime, where a parameter $0<\varepsilon\ll1$ which is inversely proportional to the speed of light, makes the solution propagate waves with wavelength $O(\varepsilon^2)$ in time and $O(1)$ in space. With the Fourier pseudospectral method to discretize the KGE in space, we propose a group of EWIs with designed Gautschi's type quadratures for the temporal integrations, which can offer any intended even order of accuracy provided that the solution is smooth enough, while all the current existing EWIs offer at most second order accuracy. The scheme is explicit, time symmetric and rigorous error estimates show the meshing strategy of the proposed method is time step $\tau=O(\varepsilon^2)$ and mesh size $h=O(1)$ as $0<\varepsilon\ll1$, which is `optimal' among all classical numerical methods towards solving the KGE directly in the limit regime, and which also distinguish our methods from other high order approaches such as Runge-Kutta methods which require $\tau=O(\varepsilon^3)$. Numerical experiments with comparisons are done to confirm the error bound and show the superiority of the proposed methods over existing classical numerical methods.