A second-order accurate implicit difference scheme for time fractional reaction-diffusion equation with variable coefficients and time drift term

Abstract: An implicit finite difference scheme based on the $L2$-$1_{\sigma}$ formula is presented for a class of one-dimensional time fractional reaction-diffusion equations with variable coefficients and time drift term. The unconditional stability and convergence of this scheme are proved rigorously by the discrete energy method, and the optimal convergence order in the $L_2$-norm is $\mathcal{O}(\tau^2 + h^2)$ with time step $\tau$ and mesh size $h$. Then, the same measure is exploited to solve the two-dimensional case of this problem and a rigorous theoretical analysis of the stability and convergence is carried out. Several numerical simulations are provided to show the efficiency and accuracy of our proposed schemes and in the last numerical experiment of this work, three preconditioned iterative methods are employed for solving the linear system of the two-dimensional case.