A spectral method for the rapid evaluation of hyperbolic potentials in two dimensions using windowed Fourier projection
This work addresses a computational bottleneck for researchers in wave propagation and scattering simulations, offering a significant speedup for large-scale problems.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently evaluating the solution of the 2D scalar wave equation with many point sources and high-frequency time signatures, which is crucial for time-domain scattering solvers. The result is a quasi-linear scaling algorithm that achieves up to five orders of magnitude acceleration over direct evaluation, demonstrated with up to a million sources and targets and 6-digit accuracy.
We present a fast algorithm for evaluating the (non-smooth) solution of the free-space two-dimensional (2D) scalar wave equation with many point sources, each with a high-frequency band-limited time signature. Such an algorithm is key to an efficient time-domain scattering solver using spatially-discretized hyperbolic layer potentials. Given $M$ sources/targets and $N_t$ time steps, direct evaluation costs $O(M^2N_t^2)$, due to the history dependence. We develop a quasi-linear scaling algorithm that splits the solution at a given time into (a) a non-smooth time-local part, (b) a (smooth) near history involving sources up to ${\mathcal O}(1)$ domain traversal times into the past, plus (c) a (very smooth) far history comprising all waves emitted before the near history. The local part is computed directly via high-order quadrature. A naive spatial Fourier transform for (b) plus (c) would be both slowly converging and arbitrarily oscillatory as time progresses. Yet in (b) the oscillations are controlled, so we use the recent truncated windowed Fourier projection (TK-WFP) method to give rapid convergence. For (c) -- present due to the weak Huygens' principle -- we exploit a new large-time sum-of-exponentials approximation of the free-space wave kernel. Numerical examples with up to a million sources and targets, a domain of $300\times 300$ wavelengths, and 6-digit accuracy, show an acceleration of five orders of magnitude relative to direct evaluation.