Numerical approximation of discontinuous solutions of the semilinear wave equation

A fully discrete low-regularity integrator with high-frequency recovery techniques is constructed to approximate rough and possibly discontinuous solutions of the semilinear wave equation. The proposed method can capture the discontinuities of the solutions correctly without spurious oscillations and can approximate rough and discontinuous solutions with a higher convergence rate than pre-existing methods. Rigorous analysis is presented for the convergence rates of the proposed method in approximating solutions such that $(u,\partial_{t}u)\in C([0,T];H^{\gamma}\times H^{\gamma-1})$ for $\gamma\in(0,1]$. For discontinuous solutions of bounded variation in one dimension (which allow jump discontinuities), the proposed method is proved to have almost first-order convergence under the step size condition $\tau \sim N^{-1}$, where $\tau$ and $N$ denote the time step size and the number of Fourier terms in the space discretization, respectively. Extensive numerical examples are presented in both one and two dimensions to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method in improving the accuracy in approximating rough and discontinuous solutions of the semilinear wave equation. The numerical results are consistent with the theoretical results and show the efficiency of the proposed method.