A novel, structure-preserving, second-order-in-time relaxation scheme for Schr\"odinger-Poisson systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a new second-order-in-time, structure-preserving relaxation scheme for Schr"odinger-Poisson systems, combining Crank-Nicolson and finite element methods, with demonstrated numerical robustness and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel explicit relaxation scheme that preserves key physical properties and achieves second-order accuracy for Schr"odinger-Poisson systems.

Findings

Scheme is second order in time.

Scheme conserves mass and energy discretely.

Numerical experiments confirm robustness and effectiveness.

Abstract

We introduce a new structure preserving, second order in time relaxation-type scheme for approximating solutions of the Schr\"odinger-Poisson system. More specifically, we use the Crank-Nicolson scheme as a time stepping mechanism, whilst the nonlinearity is handled by means of a relaxation approach in the spirit of \cite{Besse, KK} for the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. For the spatial discretisation we use the standard conforming finite element scheme. The resulting scheme is explicit with respect to the nonlinearity, i.e. it requires the solution of a linear system for each time-step, and satisfies discrete versions of the system's mass conservation and energy balance laws for constant meshes. The scheme is seen to be second order in time. We conclude by presenting some numerical experiments, including an example from cosmology and an example with variable time-steps which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the new scheme.