Lie Group Spectral Variational Integrators

We present a new class of high-order variational integrators on Lie groups. We show that these integrators are symplectic and momentum-preserving, can be constructed to be of arbitrarily high order, or can be made to converge geometrically. Furthermore, these methods are capable of taking very large time-steps. We demonstrate the construction of one such variational integrator for the rigid body and discuss how this construction could be generalized to other related Lie group problems. We close with several numerical examples which demonstrate our claims and discuss further extensions of our work.