Spatio-temporal Lie–Poisson discretization for incompressible magnetohydrodynamics on the sphere

Abstract We give a structure preserving spatio-temporal discretization for incompressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) on the sphere. Discretization in space is based on the theory of geometric quantization, which yields a spatially discretized analogue of the MHD equations as a finite-dimensional Lie–Poisson system on the dual of the magnetic extension Lie algebra $\mathfrak{f}=\mathfrak{su}(N)\ltimes \mathfrak{su}(N)^{*}$. We also give accompanying structure preserving time discretizations for Lie–Poisson systems on the dual of semidirect product Lie algebras of the form $\mathfrak{f}=\mathfrak{g}\ltimes \mathfrak{g^{*}}$, where $\mathfrak{g}$ is a $J$-quadratic Lie algebra. The time integration method is free of computationally costly matrix exponentials. We prove that the full method preserves a modified Lie–Poisson structure and corresponding Casimir functions, and that the modified structure and Casimirs converge to the continuous ones. The method is demonstrated for two models of magnetic fluids: incompressible MHD and Hazeltine’s model.