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The goal of this paper is to develop a novel semi-implicit spectral deferred correction (SDC) time marching method. The method can be used in a large class of problems, especially for highly nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) without easily separating of stiff and non-stiff components, which is more general and efficient comparing with traditional semi-implicit SDC methods. The proposed semi-implicit SDC method is based on low order time integration methods and corrected iteratively. The order of accuracy is increased for each additional iteration. And we also explore its local truncation error analytically. This SDC method is intended to be combined with the method of lines, which provides a flexible framework to develop high order semi-implicit time marching methods for nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper we mainly focus on the applications of the nonlinear PDEs with higher order spatial derivatives, e.g. convection diffusion equation, the surface diffusion and Willmore flow of graphs, the Cahn– Hilliard equation, the Cahn–Hilliard–Brinkman system and the phase field crystal equation. Coupled with the local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) spatial discretization, the fully discrete schemes are all high order accurate in both space and time, and stable numerically with the time step proportional to the spatial mesh size. Numerical experiments are carried out to illustrate the accuracy and capability of the proposed semi-implicit SDC method.

We introduce two exponential-type integrators for the “good” Boussinesq equation. They are of orders one and two, respectively, and they require lower spatial regularity of the solution compared to classical exponential integrators. For the first integrator, we prove first-order convergence in H^r for solutions in H^{r+1} with r>1/2. This new integrator even converges (with lower order) in H^r for solutions in H^r, i.e., without any additional smoothness assumptions. For the second integrator, we prove second-order convergence in H^r for solutions in H^{r+3} with r>1/2 and convergence in L^2 for solutions in H^3. Numerical results are reported to illustrate the established error estimates. The experiments clearly demonstrate that the new exponential-type integrators are favorable over classical exponential integrators for initial data with low regularity.

The definition of quasi-local mass for a bounded space-like region in space-time is essential in several major unsettled roblems in general relativity. The quasi-local mass is expected to be a type of flux integral on the boundary two-surface $ \sum = \partial \Omega $ and should be independent of whichever space-like region $\sum $ bounds. An important idea which is related to the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity is to consider a reference surface in a flat ambient space with the same first fundamental form and derive the quasi-local mass from the difference of the extrinsic geometries. This approach has be taken by Brown-York [4][5] and Liu-Yau [16][17] (see also related works [12], [15], [6], [14], [3], [9], [28], [32]) to define such notions using the isometric embedding theorem into the Euclidean three space. However, there exist surfaces in the Minkowski space whose quasilocal mass is strictly positive [19]. It appears that the momentum information needs to accounted for to reconcile the difference. In order to fully capture this information, we use isometric embeddings into the Minkowski space as references. In this article, we first prove an existence and uniqueness theorem for such isometric embeddings. We then solve the boundary value problem for Jang’s [13] equation as a procedure to recognize such a surface in the Minkowski space. In doing so, we discover new expression of quasi-local mass for a large class of “admissible” surfaces (see Theorem A and Remark 1.1). The new mass is positive when the ambient space-time satisfies the dominant energy condition and vanishes on surfaces in the Minkowski space. It also has the nice asymptotic behavior at spatial infinity and null infinity. Some of these results were announced in [29].

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