Time staggering for wave equations revisited

Staggering in numerical methods for wave equations generally enhances accuracy and stability. This note is about time staggering. We assess a fourth-order, explicit, time-staggered method, while focussing on a class of second-order wave equations. Alternative explicit integration methods for this class belong to the Runge-Kutta-Nyström (RKN) family and we have selected three explicit RKN methods for our assessment of the time-staggered method. Compared to these three explicit RKN methods, the time-staggered method possesses a substantially longer stability interval. Our aim is to examine whether this advantage can be expected to borne out in actual computation.