Numerical methods for computing ground states and dynamics of nonlinear relativistic Hartree equation for boson stars

Efficient and accurate numerical methods are presented for computing ground states and dynamics of the three-dimensional (3D) nonlinear relativistic Hartree equation both without and with an external potential. This equation was derived recently for describing the mean field dynamics of boson stars. In its numerics, due to the appearance of pseudodifferential operator which is defined in phase space via symbol, spectral method is more suitable for the discretization in space than other numerical methods such as finite difference method, etc. For computing ground states, a backward Euler sine pseudospectral (BESP) method is proposed based on a gradient flow with discrete normalization; and respectively, for computing dynamics, a time-splitting sine pseudospectral (TSSP) method is presented based on a splitting technique to decouple the nonlinearity. Both BESP and TSSP are efficient in computation via discrete sine transform, and are of spectral accuracy in spatial discretization. TSSP is of second-order accuracy in temporal discretization and conserves the normalization in discretized level. In addition, when the external potential and initial data for dynamics are spherically symmetric, the original 3D problem collapses to a quasi1D problem, for which both BESP and TSSP methods are extended successfully with a proper change of variables. Finally, extensive numerical results are reported to demonstrate the spectral accuracy of the methods and to show very interesting and complicated phenomena in the mean field dynamics of boson stars. 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.