Remarks on the stability of Cartesian PMLs in corners (Q450936)

The authors consider first order hyperbolic equations on unbounded domains and the method of so-called perfectly matched layers (PML) to make numerical computation feasible by restricting it to a finite domain through the application of an absorbing layer in which there works a (possibly piecewise smooth) damping. This method -- which admits both an unsplit and a split version -- is known to work well mostly but leading, after discretization and in dimensions greater than 1, possibly to instabilities in corners of those layers. The authors investigate this possible instability both for the analytical solution (where they show that for the split version and (piecewise) constant damping there is no instability: the solution of a linear first order hyperbolic system is bounded by the initial data) and for the two-dimensional acoustic system, its unsplit version and its discretization on quadrilateral elements using \(Q_r-Q_r^{disc}\) polynomials in space. Proposing then in time two explicit second order discretizations which differ in corners, it turns out that for one of them the customary Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition is not enough in the vicinity of the corner (and in dependence on the damping) whereas for the other discretization this is not the case. These theoretical results are illustrated and shown to reflect the real behaviour of the fully discrete solutions by numerical experiments.