A uniformly accurate multiscale time integrator pseudospectral method for the Klein-Gordon equation in the nonrelativistic limit regime

Abstract

We propose and analyze a multiscale time integrator Fourier pseudospectral (MTI-FP) method for solving the Klein-Gordon (KG) equation with a dimensionless parameter $0<\varepsilon\leq1$ which is inversely proportional to the speed of light. In the nonrelativistic limit regime, i.e. $0<\varepsilon\ll1$, the solution to the KG equation propagates waves with amplitude at $O(1)$ and wavelength at $O(\varepsilon^2)$ in time and $O(1)$ in space, which causes significantly numerical burdens due to the high oscillation in time. The MTI-FP method is designed by adapting a multiscale decomposition by frequency (MDF) to the solution at each time step and applying an exponential wave integrator to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with wave operator under well-prepared initial data for $\varepsilon^2$-frequency and $O(1)$-amplitude waves and a KG-type equation with small initial data for the reminder waves in the MDF. We rigorously establish two independent error bounds in $H^2$-norm to the MTI-FP method at $O(h^{m_0}+τ^2+\varepsilon^2)$ and $O(h^{m_0}+τ^2/\varepsilon^2)$ with $h$ mesh size, $τ$ time step and $m_0\ge2$ an integer depending on the regularity of the solution, which immediately imply that the MTI-FP converges uniformly and optimally in space with exponential convergence rate if the solution is smooth, and uniformly in time with linear convergence rate at $O(τ)$ for all $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$ and optimally with quadratic convergence rate at $O(τ^2)$ in the regimes when either $\varepsilon=O(1)$ or $0<\varepsilon\le τ$. Numerical results are reported to confirm the error bounds and demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the MTI-FP method for the KG equation, especially in the nonrelativistic limit regime.