Shifted Laplacian based multigrid preconditioners for solving indefinite Helmholtz equations

Abstract

Shifted Laplacian multigrid preconditioner has become a tool du jour for solving highly indefinite Helmholtz equations. The idea is to add a complex damping to the original Helmholtz operator and then apply a multigrid processing to the resulting operator using it to precondition Krylov methods, usually Bi-CGSTAB. Not only such preconditioning accelerates Krylov iterations, but it does so more efficiently than the multigrid applied to original Helmholtz equations. In this paper, we compare properties of the Helmholtz operator with and without the shift and propose a new combination of the two. Also applied here is a relaxation of normal equations that replaces diverging linear schemes on some intermediate scales. Finally, an acceleration by the ray correction is considered.