OptiXDE: A fast optical-inspired solver for differential equations

Abstract

OptiXDE is a matrix-free spectral operator framework for differential equations on uniform grids and embedded domains. Inspired by angular-spectrum propagation in Fourier optics, it maps transform-diagonal spatial operators to analytical modal multipliers and composes them with physical-space operators for nonlinearities, geometry and boundary enforcement. A common transform--operator--inverse-transform backbone is demonstrated across transient diffusion, periodic and embedded-domain Poisson problems, the cubic nonlinear Schr"odinger equation, viscous Burgers dynamics, the two-dimensional Allen--Cahn equation and incompressible flows from the Taylor--Green vortex to embedded-cylinder vortex shedding. Transform-compatible linear problems are recovered near the floating-point limit, whereas errors on the singular L-shaped domain remain localized near the re-entrant corner and regularized interface. Nonlinear benchmarks recover second-order temporal convergence and the expected conservative or dissipative behavior, while incompressibility remains near round-off level during long-time vortex shedding. The matrix-free updates require \(\mathcal{O}(N\log N)\) work and \(\mathcal{O}(N)\) memory. Device-resident transform workloads reach \(94.9\times\) GPU acceleration, and the complete embedded-cylinder solver achieves a \(42.1\times\) CPU--GPU speedup under matched numerical settings. These results establish OptiXDE as a deterministic and extensible operator-centric framework for structured and embedded-domain differential equations.