Transparent boundary condition and its high frequency approximation for the Schrödinger equation on a rectangular computational domain

Abstract

This paper addresses the numerical implementation of the transparent boundary condition (TBC) and its various approximations for the free Schrödinger equation on a rectangular computational domain. In particular, we consider the exact TBC and its spatially local approximation under high frequency assumption along with an appropriate corner condition. For the spatial discretization, we use a Legendre–Galerkin spectral method where Lobatto polynomials serve as the basis. Within variational formalism, we first arrive at the time-continuous dynamical system using spatially discrete form of the initial boundary-value problem incorporating the boundary conditions. This dynamical system is then discretized using various time-stepping methods, namely, the backward-differentiation formula of order 1 and 2 (i.e., BDF1 and BDF2, respectively) and the trapezoidal rule (TR) to obtain a fully discrete system. Next, we extend this approach to the novel Padé based implementation of the TBC presented by Yadav and Vaibhav (2024). Finally, several numerical tests are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the boundary maps (incorporating the corner conditions) where we study the stability and convergence behaviour empirically.