On the stability of implicit-explicit linear multistep methods Original Research Article

In many applications, such as atmospheric chemistry, large systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with both stiff and nonstiff parts have to be solved numerically. A popular approach in such cases is to integrate the stiff parts implicitly and the nonstiff parts explicitly. In this paper we study a class of implicit-explicit (IMEX) linear multistep methods intended for such applications. The paper focuses on the linear stability of popular second order methods like extrapolated BDF, Crank-Nicolson leap-frog and a particular class of Adams methods. We present results for problems with decoupled eigenvalues and comment on some specific CFL restrictions associated with advection terms.