A cardinal approach for nonlinear variable-order time fractional Schrödinger equation defined by Atangana–Baleanu–Caputo derivative

Abstract

Abstract This paper is concerned with an operational matrix method based on the shifted Legendre cardinal functions for solving the nonlinear variable-order time fractional Schrodinger equation. The variable-order fractional derivative operator is defined in the Atangana–Baleanu–Caputo sense. Through the way, a new operational matrix of variable-order fractional derivative is derived for the shifted Legendre cardinal functions and used in the established method. More precisely, the unknown solution is separated into the real and imaginary parts, and then these parts are expanded in terms of the shifted Legendre cardinal functions with undetermined coefficients. These expansions are substituted into the main equation and the generated operational matrix is utilized to extract a system of nonlinear algebraic equations. Thereafter, the yielded system is solved to obtain an approximate solution for the problem. The precision of the established approach is examined through various types of test examples. Numerical simulations confirm that the suggested approach is high accurate in providing satisfactory results.