Mittag--Leffler stability of numerical solutions to time fractional ODEs

The asymptotic stable region and long-time decay rate of solutions to linear homogeneous Caputo time fractional ordinary differential equations (F-ODEs) are known to be completely determined by the eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix. Very different from the exponential decay of solutions to classical ODEs, solutions of F-ODEs decay only polynomially, leading to the so-called Mittag-Leffler stability, which was already extended to semi-linear F-ODEs with small perturbations. This work is mainly devoted to the qualitative analysis of the long-time behavior of numerical solutions. By applying the singularity analysis of generating functions developed by Flajolet and Odlyzko (SIAM J. Disc. Math. 3 (1990), 216-240), we are able to prove that both $\mathcal{L}$1 scheme and strong $A$-stable fractional linear multistep methods (F-LMMs) can preserve the numerical Mittag-Leffler stability for linear homogeneous F-ODEs exactly as in the continuous case. Through an improved estimate of the discrete fractional resolvent operator, we show that strong $A$-stable F-LMMs are also Mittag-Leffler stable for semi-linear F-ODEs under small perturbations. For the numerical schemes based on $\alpha$-difference approximation to Caputo derivative, we establish the Mittag-Leffler stability for semi-linear problems by making use of properties of the Poisson transformation and the decay rate of the continuous fractional resolvent operator. Numerical experiments are presented for several typical time fractional evolutional equations, including time fractional sub-diffusion equations, fractional linear system and semi-linear F-ODEs. All the numerical results exhibit the typical long-time polynomial decay rate, which is fully consistent with our theoretical predictions.