On the stability of implicit-explicit linear multistep methods

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. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.