A quadrature scheme for steady-state diffusion equations involving fractional power of regularly accretive operator

Abstract: In this paper, we construct a quadrature scheme to numerically solve the nonlocal diffusion equation $(\mathcal{A}^\alpha+b\mathcal{I})u=f$ with $\mathcal{A}^\alpha$ the $\alpha$-th power of the regularly accretive operator $\mathcal{A}$. Rigorous error analysis is carried out and sharp error bounds (up to some negligible constants) are obtained. The error estimates include a wide range of cases in which the regularity index and spectral angle of $\mathcal{A}$, the smoothness of $f$, the size of $b$ and $\alpha$ are all involved. The quadrature scheme is exponentially convergent with respect to the step size and is root-exponentially convergent with respect to the number of solves. Some numerical tests are presented in the last section to verify the sharpness of our estimates. Furthermore, both the scheme and the error bounds can be utilized directly to solve and analyze time-dependent problems.