Hisham bin Zubair

Bram Reps, Wim Vanroose, Hisham bin Zubair

Multigrid preconditioners and solvers for the indefinite Helmholtz equation suffer from non-stability of the stationary smoothers due to the indefinite spectrum of the operator. In this paper we explore GMRES as a replacement for the stationary smoothers of the standard multigrid method. This results in a robust and efficient solver for a complex shifted or stretched Helmholtz problem that can be used as a preconditioner. Very few GMRES iterations are required on each level to build a good multigrid method. The convergence behavior is compared to a theoretically derived stable polynomial smoother. We test this method on some benchmark problems and report on the observed convergence behavior.

Hisham bin Zubair, Bram Reps, Wim Vanroose

The Schrödinger equation defines the dynamics of quantum particles which has been an area of unabated interest in physics. We demonstrate how simple transformations of the Schrödinger equation leads to a coupled linear system, whereby each diagonal block is a high frequency Helmholtz problem. Based on this model, we derive indefinite Helmholtz model problems with strongly varying wavenumbers. We employ the iterative approach for their solution. In particular, we develop a preconditioner that has its spectrum restricted to a quadrant (of the complex plane) thereby making it easily invertible by multigrid methods with standard components. This multigrid preconditioner is used in conjuction with suitable Krylov-subspace methods for solving the indefinite Helmholtz model problems. The aim of this study is to report the feasbility of this preconditioner for the model problems. We compare this idea with the other prevalent preconditioning ideas, and discuss its merits. Results of numerical experiments are presented, which complement the proposed ideas, and show that this preconditioner may be used in an automatic setting.

Bram Reps, Wim Vanroose, Hisham bin Zubair

This paper studies and analyzes a preconditioned Krylov solver for Helmholtz problems that are formulated with absorbing boundary layers based on complex coordinate stretching. The preconditioner problem is a Helmholtz problem where not only the coordinates in the absorbing layer have an imaginary part, but also the coordinates in the interior region. This results into a preconditioner problem that is invertible with a multigrid cycle. We give a numerical analysis based on the eigenvalues and evaluate the performance with several numerical experiments. The method is an alternative to the complex shifted Laplacian and it gives a comparable performance for the studied model problems.