A novel, structure-preserving, second-order-in-time relaxation scheme for Schrödinger-Poisson systems

The authors acknowledge the support from The Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant RIG008215 . I.K. would also like to acknowledge the support from London Mathematical Society through an Emmy Noether Fellowship . In addition, Th. K. and I.K. thank the Edinburgh Mathematical Society for the Covid Recovery Fund that allowed for the completion and the submission of this paper.We introduce a new structure preserving, second order in time relaxation-type scheme for approximating solutions of the Schrödinger-Poisson system. More specifically, we use the Crank-Nicolson scheme as a time stepping mechanism, whilst the nonlinearity is handled by means of a relaxation approach in the spirit of [10,11,34] for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. For the spatial discretisation we use the standard conforming finite element scheme. The resulting scheme is explicit with respect to the nonlinearity, i.e. it requires the solution of a linear system for each time-step, and satisfies discrete versions of the system's mass conservation and energy balance laws for constant meshes. The scheme is seen to be second order in time. We conclude by presenting some numerical experiments, including an example from cosmology and an example with variable time-steps which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new scheme.Peer reviewe

A novel, structure-preserving, second-order-in-time relaxation scheme for Schrödinger-Poisson systems

We introduce a new second order in time relaxation-type scheme for approximating solutions of the Schr\"odinger-Poisson system. More specifically, we use the Crank-Nicolson scheme as a time stepping mechanism, whilst the nonlinearity is handled by means of a relaxation approach in the spirit of \cite{Besse, KK} for the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. For the spatial discretisation we use the standard conforming finite element scheme. The resulting scheme is explicit with respect to the nonlinearity, satisfies discrete versions of the system's conservation laws, and is seen to be second order in time. We conclude by presenting some numerical experiments, including an example from cosmology, that demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new scheme.Comment: 17pages, 10 figure