Multisymplecticity of hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin methods

In this paper, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions for a hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method to satisfy a multisymplectic conservation law, when applied to a canonical Hamiltonian system of partial differential equations. We show that these conditions are satisfied by the "hybridized" versions of several of the most commonly-used finite element methods, including mixed, nonconforming, and discontinuous Galerkin methods. (Interestingly, for the continuous Galerkin method in dimension greater than one, we show that multisymplecticity only holds in a weaker sense.) Consequently, these general-purpose finite element methods may be used for structure-preserving discretization (or semidiscretization) of canonical Hamiltonian systems of ODEs or PDEs. This establishes multisymplecticity for a large class of arbitrarily-high-order methods on unstructured meshes.