Validated Continuation for Equilibria of PDEs

One of the most efficient methods for determining the equilibria of a continuous parameterized family of differential equations is to use predictor-corrector continuation techniques. In the case of partial differential equations this procedure must be applied to some finite-dimensional approximation, which of course raises the question of the validity of the output. We introduce a new technique that combines the information obtained from the predictor-corrector steps with ideas from rigorous computations and verifies that the numerically produced equilibrium for the finite-dimensional system can be used to explicitly define a set which contains a unique equilibrium for the infinite-dimensional partial differential equation. Using the Cahn-Hilliard and Swift-Hohenberg equations as models we demonstrate that the cost of this new validated continuation is less than twice the cost of the standard continuation method alone.