A Class of Iterative Solvers for the Helmholtz Equation: Factorizations, Sweeping Preconditioners, Source Transfer, Single Layer Potentials, Polarized Traces, and Optimized Schwarz Methods

Solving time-harmonic wave propagation problems by iterative methods is a difficult task, and over the last two decades, an important research effort has gone into developing preconditioners for the simplest representative of such wave propagation problems, the Helmholtz equation. A specific class of these new preconditioners are considered here. They were developed by researchers with various backgrounds using formulations and notations that are very different, and all are among the most promising preconditioners for the Helmholtz equation. The goal of the present manuscript is to show that this class of preconditioners are based on a common mathematical principle, and they can all be formulated in the context of domain decomposition methods called optimized Schwarz methods. This common formulation allows us to explain in detail how and why all these methods work. The domain decomposition formulation also allows us to avoid technicalities in the implementation description we give of these recent methods. The equivalence of these methods with optimized Schwarz methods translates at the discrete level into equivalence with approximate block LU decomposition preconditioners, and we give in each case the algebraic version, including a detailed description of the approximations used. While we chose to use the Helmholtz equation for which these methods were developed, our notation is completely general and the algorithms we give are written for an arbitrary second order elliptic operator. The algebraic versions are even more general, assuming only a connectivity pattern in the discretization matrix.