A Uniformly Accurate Multiscale Time Integrator Pseudospectral Method for the Dirac Equation in the Nonrelativistic Limit Regime

Abstract

We propose and rigourously analyze a multiscale time integrator Fourier pseudospectral (MTI-FP) method for the (linear) Dirac equation with a dimensionless parameter $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$ which is inversely proportional to the speed of light. In the nonrelativistic limit regime, i.e., $0<\varepsilon\ll 1$, the solution exhibits highly oscillatory propagating waves with wavelength $O(\varepsilon^2)$ and $O(1)$ in time and space, respectively. Due to the rapid temporal oscillation, designing and analyzing numerical methods with uniform error bounds in $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$ is quite challenging. We present the MTI-FP method based on properly adopting a multiscale decomposition of the solution of the Dirac equation and applying the exponential wave integrator with appropriate numerical quadratures. By a careful study of the error propagation and using the energy method, we establish two independent error estimates via two different mathematical approaches as $h^{m_0}+\frac{\tau^2}{\varepsilon^2}$ and $h^{m_0}+\tau^2+\varepsilon^2$, where $h$ is the mesh size, $\tau$ is the time step, and $m_0$ depends on the regularity of the solution. These two error bounds immediately imply that the MTI-FP method converges uniformly and optimally in space with exponential convergence rate if the solution is smooth, and uniformly in time with linear convergence rate at $O(\tau)$ for all $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$ and optimally with quadratic convergence rate at $O(\tau^2)$ in the regimes when either $\varepsilon=O(1)$ or $0<\varepsilon\lesssim \tau$. Numerical results are reported to demonstrate that our error estimates are optimal and sharp. Finally, the MTI-FP method is applied to study numerically the convergence rates of the solution of the Dirac equation to those of its limiting models when $\varepsilon\to0^+$.