May 18 – 22, 2026
Virginia Tech
America/New_York timezone

Structure-preserving Krylov Subspace Approximations for the Matrix Exponential of Hamiltonian Matrices

May 21, 2026, 2:00 PM
25m
Torgersen Hall 1040 (Virginia Tech)

Torgersen Hall 1040

Virginia Tech

Minisymposium Talk Symplectic Linear Algebra and Applications Symplectic Linear Algebra and Applications

Speaker

Heike Faßbender (TU Braunschweig, Institute for Numerical Analysis)

Description

It is well known that the matrix exponential $\exp(H)$ is symplectic whenever
$H \in \mathbb{R}^{2n \times 2n}$ is a Hamiltonian matrix. A matrix $H$ is called
Hamiltonian if it satisfies $HJ = (HJ)^{T},$
while a matrix $S$ is called symplectic (or $J$-orthogonal) if $S^{T} J S = J.$
Here, $J \in \mathbb{R}^{2n \times 2n}$ denotes $J = \left [\begin{smallmatrix} 0 & I_n \\ -I_n & 0\end{smallmatrix}\right].$

In this talk, we study structure-preserving Krylov subspace methods for approximating the matrix–vector products $f(H)b,$ where $H$ is a large Hamiltonian matrix and $f$ denotes either the matrix exponential or the related $\varphi$-function ($\varphi(z) = \frac{e^{z} - 1}{z}$). Such computations are central to exponential integrators for Hamiltonian systems.
Assume that a suitable projection $\Pi = V W^{T} \in \mathbb{R}^{2 n \times 2 n}$ is given, where $V, W \in \mathbb{R}^{2n \times 2m}$, $m \leq n$, have full column rank and $W^{T} V = I_{2m}$.
Then $f(H)b$ for $b \in \mathbb{R}^{2n}$ can be approximated by $f(H)b \approx V f(\widetilde{H}) W^{T} b$ with $\widetilde{H} = W^{T} H V \in \mathbb{R}^{2m \times 2m}.$ When $m\ll n$, evaluating $f(\widetilde{H})b$ is far less computationally expensive than evaluating $f(H)b$. Typically, $V=W$ and the columns of $V$ form an orthonormal basis of the standard Krylov subspace $\mathcal{K}_{2m}(H,b)=\operatorname{span}\{b,Hb,\ldots,H^{2m-1}b\}$ of order $2m$, but then $\widetilde{H}$ is in general not a Hamiltonian matrix. This motivates the use of Krylov bases with $J$-orthogonal columns that yield Hamiltonian projected matrices and symplectic reduced exponentials. We compare several such structure-preserving Krylov methods on representative Hamiltonian test problems, focusing on accuracy, efficiency, and structure preservation, and briefly discuss adaptive strategies for selecting the Krylov subspace dimension.

Author

Heike Faßbender (TU Braunschweig, Institute for Numerical Analysis)

Co-authors

Michel Senn (TU Braunschweig, Institute for Numerical Analysis) Peter Benner (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems)

Presentation materials

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