On diagonal dominance of FEM stiffness matrix of fractional Laplacian and maximum principle preserving schemes for fractional Allen-Cahn equation

Abstract: In this paper, we study diagonal dominance of the stiffness matrix resulted from the piecewise linear finite element discretisation of the integral fractional Laplacian under global homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition in one spatial dimension. We first derive the exact form of this matrix in the frequency space which is extendable to multi-dimensional rectangular elements. Then we give the complete answer when the stiffness matrix can be strictly diagonally dominant. As one application, we apply this notion to the construction of maximum principle preserving schemes for the fractional-in-space Allen-Cahn equation, and provide ample numerical results to verify our findings.