Numerical comparison of mass-conservative schemes for the gross-pitaevskii equation

Abstract

In this paper we present a numerical comparison of various massconservative discretizations for the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We have three main objectives. First, we want to clarify how purely massconservative methods perform compared to methods that are additionally energyconservative or symplectic. Second, we shall compare the accuracy of energyconservative and symplectic methods among each other. Third, we will investigate if a linearized energy-conserving method suffers from a loss of accuracy compared to an approach which requires to solve a full nonlinear problem in each time-step. In order to obtain a representative comparison, our numerical experiments cover different physically relevant test cases, such as traveling solitons, stationary multi-solitons, Bose-Einstein condensates in an optical lattice and vortex pattern in a rapidly rotating superfluid. We shall also consider a computationally severe test case involving a pseudo Mott insulator. Our space discretization is based on finite elements throughout the paper. We will also give special attention to long time behavior and possible coupling conditions between time-step sizes and mesh sizes. The main observation of this paper is that mass conservation alone will not lead to a competitive method in complex settings. Furthermore, energy-conserving and symplectic methods are both reliable and accurate, yet, the energy-conservative schemes achieve a visibly higher accuracy in our test cases. Finally, the scheme that performs best throughout our experiments is an energy-conserving relaxation scheme with linear time-stepping proposed by C. Besse (SINUM,42(3):934-952,2004).