Fully discretized Sobolev gradient flow for the Gross-Pitaevskii eigenvalue problem

Abstract: This paper studies the numerical approximation of the ground state of the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) eigenvalue problem with a fully discretized Sobolev gradient flow induced by the $H^1$ norm. For the spatial discretization, we consider the finite element method with quadrature using $P^k$ basis on a simplicial mesh and $Q^k$ basis on a rectangular mesh. We prove the global convergence to a critical point of the discrete GP energy, and establish a local exponential convergence to the ground state under the assumption that the linearized discrete Schr\"odinger operator has a positive spectral gap. We also show that for the $P^1$ finite element discretization with quadrature on an unstructured shape regular simplicial mesh, the eigengap satisfies a mesh-independent lower bound, which implies a mesh-independent local convergence rate for the proposed discrete gradient flow. Numerical experiments with discretization by high order $Q^k$ spectral element methods in two and three dimensions are provided to validate the efficiency of the proposed method.