Simone Zuccher

Marco Caliari, Simone Zuccher

We extensively study the numerical accuracy of the well-known time splitting Fourier spectral method for the approximation of singular solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. In particular, we explore its capability of preserving a steady-state vortex solution, whose density profile is approximated by a very accurate diagonal Padé expansion of order 8, here explicitly derived for the first time. Although the Fourier spectral method turns out to be only slightly more accurate than a time splitting finite difference scheme, the former is reliable and efficient. Moreover, at a post-processing stage, it allows an accurate evaluation of the solution outside grid points, thus becoming particularly appealing when high resolution is needed, such as in the study of quantum vortex interactions.

Marco Caliari, Simone Zuccher

Although Fourier series approximation is ubiquitous in computational physics owing to the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm, efficient techniques for the fast evaluation of a three-dimensional truncated Fourier series at a set of \emph{arbitrary} points are quite rare, especially in MATLAB language. Here we employ the Nonequispaced Fast Fourier Transform (NFFT, by J. Keiner, S. Kunis, and D. Potts), a C library designed for this purpose, and provide a Matlab and GNU Octave interface that makes NFFT easily available to the Numerical Analysis community. We test the effectiveness of our package in the framework of quantum vortex reconnections, where pseudospectral Fourier methods are commonly used and local high resolution is required in the post-processing stage. We show that the efficient evaluation of a truncated Fourier series at arbitrary points provides excellent results at a computational cost much smaller than carrying out a numerical simulation of the problem on a sufficiently fine regular grid that can reproduce comparable details of the reconnecting vortices.