A PDE approach to fractional diffusion: a space-fractional wave equation (Q2315197)

The authors present a partial differential equation approach for an evolution equation involving second order derivative in time and the spectral fractional powers, of order \(s \in (0,1)\), of symmetric, coercive, linear, elliptic, second-order operators in bounded domains \(\Omega \). They realize fractional diffusion as the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a nonuniformly elliptic problem posed on the semi-infinite cylinder \(\mathcal{C}= \Omega \times (0,\infty )\). The evolution problem is then written as a quasi-stationary elliptic problem with a dynamic boundary condition. Space, time, and space - time regularity estimates for its solution are derived. The latter problem exhibits an exponential decay in the extended dimension and thus suggests a truncation that is suitable for numerical approximation. Two fully discrete schemes are established and analyzed using the stated approach. The discretization in time is based on finite difference discretization techniques: the trapezoidal and leapfrog schemes. The discretization in space relies on the tensorization of a first-degree FEM in \(\Omega \) with a suitable \(hp\)-FEM in the extended variable. For both schemes, stability and error estimates are proved. A first-degree FEM in \(\Omega \) with mesh refinement near corners and the aforementioned \(hp\)-FEM in the extended variable are considered. The a priori error analysis of the trapezoidal scheme is extended to open, bounded, polytopal but not necessarily convex domains \(\Omega \subset{\mathbb{R}}^2\). Some numerical tests are presented. The article is interesting and very useful.