Variational solution of the Schrödinger equation using plane waves in adaptive coordinates: The radial case

Fast solution of elliptic partial differential equations using linear combinations of plane waves

Given an arbitrary elliptic partial differential equation (PDE), a procedure for obtaining its solution is proposed based on the method of Ritz: the solution is written as a linear combination of plane waves and the coefficients are obtained by variational minimization. The PDE to be solved is cast as a system of linear equations Ax=b, where the matrix A is not sparse, which prevents the straightforward application of standard iterative methods in order to solve it. This sparseness problem can be circumvented by means of a recursive bisection approach based on the fast Fourier transform, which makes it possible to implement fast versions of some stationary iterative methods (such as Gauss-Seidel) consuming O(NlogN) memory and executing an iteration in O(Nlog(2)N) time, N being the number of plane waves used. In a similar way, fast versions of Krylov subspace methods and multigrid methods can also be implemented. These procedures are tested on Poisson's equation expressed in adaptive coordinates. It is found that the best results are obtained with the GMRES method using a multigrid preconditioner with Gauss-Seidel relaxation steps.

Variational solution of Poisson's equation using plane waves in adaptive coordinates

A procedure for solving Poisson's equation using plane waves in adaptive coordinates (u) is described. The method, based on Gygi's work, writes a trial potential ξ as the product of a preselected Coulomb weight μ times a plane-wave expansion depending on u. Then, the Coulomb potential generated by a given density ρ is obtained by variationally optimizing ξ, so that the error in the Coulomb energy is second-order with respect to the error in ξ. The Coulomb weight μ is chosen to provide to each ξ the typical long-range tail of a Coulomb potential, so that calculations on atoms and molecules are made possible without having to resort to the supercell approximation. As a proof of concept, the method is tested on the helium atom and the H_{2} and H_{3}^{+} molecules, where Hartree-Fock energies with better than milli-Hartree accuracy require only a moderate number of plane waves.