Preconditioning of a pollution-free discretization of the Helmholtz equation

Abstract

We present a pollution-free first order system least squares (FOSLS) formulation for the Helmholtz equation, solved iteratively using a block preconditioner. This preconditioner consists of two components: one for the Schur complement, which corresponds to a preconditioner on $L_2(\Omega)$, and another defined on the test space, which we ensure remains Hermitian positive definite using subspace correction techniques. The proposed method is easy to implement and is directly applicable to general domains, including scattering problems. Numerical experiments demonstrate a linear dependence of the number of MINRES iterations on the wave number $\kappa$. We also introduce an approach to estimate algebraic errors which prevents unnecessary iterations.