English

Orbital-enriched Flat-top Partition of Unity Method for the Schr\"odinger Eigenproblem

Computational Physics 2022-02-22 v2 Materials Science

Abstract

Quantum mechanical calculations require the repeated solution of a Schr\"odinger equation for the wavefunctions of the system. Recent work has shown that enriched finite element methods significantly reduce the degrees of freedom required to obtain accurate solutions. However, time to solution has been adversely affected by the need to solve a generalized eigenvalue problem and the ill-conditioning of associated systems matrices. In this work, we address both issues by proposing a stable and efficient orbital-enriched partition-of-unity method to solve the Schr\"odinger boundary-value problem in a parallelepiped unit cell subject to Bloch-periodic boundary conditions. In our proposed PUM, the three-dimensional domain is covered by overlapping patches, with a compactly-supported, non-negative weight function, that is identically equal to unity over some finite subset of its support associated with each patch. This so-called flat-top property provides a pathway to devise a stable approximation over the whole domain. On each patch, we use pp-th degree orthogonal polynomials that ensure pp-th order completeness, and in addition include eigenfunctions of the radial solution of the Schr\"odinger equation. Furthermore, we adopt a variational lumping approach to construct a block-diagonal overlap matrix that yields a standard eigenvalue problem and demonstrate accuracy, stability and efficiency of the method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.09596,
  title  = {Orbital-enriched Flat-top Partition of Unity Method for the Schr\"odinger Eigenproblem},
  author = {Clelia Albrecht and Constanze Klaar and John E. Pask and Marc Alexander Schweitzer and N. Sukumar and Albert Ziegenhagel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.09596},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

24 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:01:36.845Z