Discontinuous collocation methods and gravitational self-force applications

Numerical simulations of extereme mass ratio inspirals, the mostimportant sources for the LISA detector, face several computational challenges. We present a new approach to evolving partial differential equations occurring in black hole perturbation theory and calculations of the self-force acting on point particles orbiting supermassive black holes. Such equations are distributionally sourced, and standard numerical methods, such as finite-difference or spectral methods, face difficulties associated with approximating discontinuous functions. However, in the self-force problem we typically have access to full a-priori information about the local structure of the discontinuity at the particle. Using this information, we show that high-order accuracy can be recovered by adding to the Lagrange interpolation formula a linear combination of certain jump amplitudes. We construct discontinuous spatial and temporal discretizations by operating on the corrected Lagrange formula. In a method-of-lines framework, this provides a simple and efficient method of solving time-dependent partial differential equations, without loss of accuracy near moving singularities or discontinuities. This method is well-suited for the problem of time-domain reconstruction of the metric perturbation via the Teukolsky or Regge-Wheeler-Zerilli formalisms. Parallel implementations on modern CPU and GPU architectures are discussed.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure

PAMELA: An Open-Source Software Package for Calculating Nonlocal Exact Exchange Effects on Electron Gases in Core-Shell Nanowires

We present a new pseudospectral approach for incorporating many-body, nonlocal exact exchange interactions to understand the formation of electron gases in core-shell nanowires. Our approach is efficiently implemented in the open-source software package PAMELA (Pseudospectral Analysis Method with Exchange & Local Approximations) that can calculate electronic energies, densities, wavefunctions, and band-bending diagrams within a self-consistent Schrodinger-Poisson formalism. The implementation of both local and nonlocal electronic effects using pseudospectral methods is key to PAMELA's efficiency, resulting in significantly reduced computational effort compared to finite-element methods. In contrast to the new nonlocal exchange formalism implemented in this work, we find that the simple, conventional Schrodinger-Poisson approaches commonly used in the literature (1) considerably overestimate the number of occupied electron levels, (2) overdelocalize electrons in nanowires, and (3) significantly underestimate the relative energy separation between electronic subbands. In addition, we perform several calculations in the high-doping regime that show a critical tunneling depth exists in these nanosystems where tunneling from the core-shell interface to the nanowire edge becomes the dominant mechanism of electron gas formation. Finally, in order to present a general-purpose set of tools that both experimentalists and theorists can easily use to predict electron gas formation in core-shell nanowires, we document and provide our efficient and user-friendly PAMELA source code that is freely available at http://alum.mit.edu/www/usagiComment: Accepted by AIP Advance

High-Order, Stable, And Efficient Pseudospectral Method Using Barycentric Gegenbauer Quadratures

The work reported in this article presents a high-order, stable, and efficient Gegenbauer pseudospectral method to solve numerically a wide variety of mathematical models. The proposed numerical scheme exploits the stability and the well-conditioning of the numerical integration operators to produce well-conditioned systems of algebraic equations, which can be solved easily using standard algebraic system solvers. The core of the work lies in the derivation of novel and stable Gegenbauer quadratures based on the stable barycentric representation of Lagrange interpolating polynomials and the explicit barycentric weights for the Gegenbauer-Gauss (GG) points. A rigorous error and convergence analysis of the proposed quadratures is presented along with a detailed set of pseudocodes for the established computational algorithms. The proposed numerical scheme leads to a reduction in the computational cost and time complexity required for computing the numerical quadrature while sharing the same exponential order of accuracy achieved by Elgindy and Smith-Miles (2013). The bulk of the work includes three numerical test examples to assess the efficiency and accuracy of the numerical scheme. The present method provides a strong addition to the arsenal of numerical pseudospectral methods, and can be extended to solve a wide range of problems arising in numerous applications.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 1 tabl

Free vibration analysis of laminated composite plates based on FSDT using one-dimensional IRBFN method

This paper presents a new effective radial basis function (RBF) collocation technique for the free vibration analysis of laminated composite plates using the first order shear deformation theory (FSDT). The plates, which can be rectangular or non-rectangular, are simply discretised by means of Cartesian grids. Instead of using conventional differentiated RBF networks, one-dimensional integrated RBF networks (1D-IRBFN) are employed on grid lines to approximate the field variables. A number of examples concerning various thickness-to-span ratios, material properties and boundary conditions are considered. Results obtained are compared with the exact solutions and numerical results by other techniques in the literature to investigate the performance of the proposed method

An effective spectral collocation method for the direct solution of high-order ODEs

This paper reports a new Chebyshev spectral collocation method for directly solving high-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The construction of the Chebyshev approximations is based on integration rather than conventional differentiation. This use of integration allows the multiple boundary conditions to be incorporated more efficiently. Numerical results show that the proposed formulation significantly improves the conditioning of the system and yields more accurate results and faster convergence rates than conventional formulations