Spectral analysis for preconditioning of multi-dimensional Riesz fractional diffusion equations

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the spectra of the preconditioned matrices arising from discretized multi-dimensional Riesz spatial fractional diffusion equations. The finite difference method is employed to approximate the multi-dimensional Riesz fractional derivatives, which will generate symmetric positive definite ill-conditioned multi-level Toeplitz matrices. The preconditioned conjugate gradient method with a preconditioner based on the sine transform is employed to solve the resulting linear system. Theoretically, we prove that the spectra of the preconditioned matrices are uniformly bounded in the open interval (1/2,3/2) and thus the preconditioned conjugate gradient method converges linearly. The proposed method can be extended to multi-level Toeplitz matrices generated by functions with zeros of fractional order. Our theoretical results fill in a vacancy in the literature. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate our new theoretical results in the literature and show the convergence performance of the proposed preconditioner that is better than other existing preconditioners.