A composite spectral scheme for variable coefficient Helmholtz problems

Abstract: A discretization scheme for variable coefficient Helmholtz problems on two-dimensional domains is presented. The scheme is based on high-order spectral approximations and is designed for problems with smooth solutions. The resulting system of linear equations is solved using a direct solver with O(N^1.5) complexity for the pre-computation and O(N log N) complexity for the solve. The fact that the solver is direct is a principal feature of the scheme, since iterative methods tend to struggle with the Helmholtz equation. Numerical examples demonstrate that the scheme is fast and highly accurate. For instance, using a discretization with 12 points per wave-length, a Helmholtz problem on a domain of size 100 x 100 wavelengths was solved to ten correct digits. The computation was executed on an office desktop; it involved 1.6M degrees of freedom and required 100 seconds for the pre-computation, and 0.3 seconds for the actual solve.