An implementation of the exponential time differencing scheme to the magnetohydrodynamic equations in a spherical shell

Over the last decade there has been renewed interest in applying exponential time differencing (ETD) time stepping schemes to the solution of stiff systems. In this paper, we present an implementation of such a scheme to the fully spectral solution of the incompressible magnetohydrodynamic equations in a spherical shell. One problem associated with ETD schemes is the accurate calculation of the necessary matrices; we implement and discuss in detail a variety of different methods including direct computation, contour integration, spectral expansions and recurrence relations. We compare the accuracy of six different second-order methods in determining the evolution of a three-dimensional magnetic field under the action of a prescribed time-dependent flow of electrically conducting fluid, and find that for the timestep restriction imposed by the nonlinear terms, ETD methods are no more accurate than linearly implicit methods which have the significant advantage of being easier to implement. However, ETD methods are more readily extendable than those which are linearly implicit and will become much more advantageous at higher order.     

Conductance peak splitting in charge polarized coupled quantum dots

We report a measurement of linear conductance through a series double dot as a function of the total double dot charge and the charge difference for interdot tunnel conductances between zero and one mode. The dots are defined by ten independently tunable electrostatic gates on the surface of a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure to allow separate adjustment of dot charge and interdot conductance. For weak interdot tunneling the measured double dot conductance agrees with a transport model in which each dot is individually governed by Coulomb blockade theory. As interdot tunnel conductance increases toward one mode, the measured conductance peak positions and shapes indicate both a relaxation of the charge quantization condition for individual dots and quantum mechanical charge sharing between dots. The results are in quantitative agreement with many body charge fluctuation theory.     

Spectral radial basis functions for full sphere computations

The singularity of cylindrical or spherical coordinate systems at the origin imposes certain regularity conditions on the spectral expansion of any infinitely differentiable function. There are two efficient choices of a set of radial basis functions suitable for discretising the solution of a partial differential equation posed in either such geometry. One choice is methods based on standard Chebyshev polynomials; although these may be efficiently computed using fast transforms, differentiability to all orders of the obtained solution at the origin is not guaranteed. The second is the so-called one-sided Jacobi polynomials that explicitly satisfy the required behavioural conditions. In this paper, we compare these two approaches in their accuracy, differentiability and computational speed. We find that the most accurate and concise representation is in terms of one-sided Jacobi polynomials. However, due to the lack of a competitive fast transform, Chebyshev methods may be a better choice for some computationally intensive timestepping problems and indeed will yield sufficiently (although not infinitely) differentiable solutions provided they are adequately converged.     

PARALLEL AUXILIARY SPACE AMG FOR H（curl） PROBLEMS

In this paper we review a number of auxiliary space based preconditioners for the second order definite and semi-definite Maxwell problems discretized with the lowest order Nedelec finite elements. We discuss the parallel implementation of the most promising of these methods, the ones derived from the recent Hiptmair-Xu （HX） auxiliary space decomposition [Hiptmair and Xu, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 45 （2007）, pp. 2483-2509]. An extensive set of numerical experiments demonstrate the scalability of our implementation on large-scale H（curl） problems.     

Simultaneous microchemical analysis of glycerol,fatty acid,and phosphorus in complex lipids

A single, small glycerol-containing lipid sample (50–200 nmoles) after a mild hydrolysis could be used for analysis of fatty acids, glycerol, and phosphorus. The range of the assays was from 10–500 nmoles for each lipid.     

An optimal Galerkin scheme to solve the kinematic dynamo eigenvalue problem in a full sphere

The kinematic dynamo approximation describes the generation of magnetic field in a prescribed flow of electrically-conducting liquid. One of its main uses is as a proof-of-concept tool to test hypotheses about self-exciting dynamo action. Indeed, it provided the very first quantitative evidence for the possibility of the geodynamo. Despite its utility, due to the requirement of resolving fine structures, historically, numerical work has proven difficult and reported solutions were often plagued by poor convergence. In this paper, we demonstrate the numerical superiority of a Galerkin scheme in solving the kinematic dynamo eigenvalue problem in a full sphere. After adopting a poloidal–toroidal decomposition and expanding in spherical harmonics, we express the radial dependence in terms of a basis of exponentially convergent orthogonal polynomials. Each basis function is constructed from a terse sum of one-sided Jacobi polynomials that not only satisfies the boundary conditions of matching to an electrically insulating exterior, but is everywhere infinitely differentiable, including at the origin. This Galerkin method exhibits more rapid convergence, for a given problem size, than any other scheme hitherto reported, as demonstrated by a benchmark of the magnetic diffusion problem and by comparison to numerous kinematic dynamos from the literature. In the axisymmetric flows we consider in this paper, at a magnetic Reynolds number of O(100), a convergence of 9 significant figures in the most unstable eigenvalue requires only 40 radial basis functions; alternatively, 4 significant figures requires 20 radial functions. The terse radial discretization becomes particularly advantageous when considering flows whose associated numerical solution requires a large number of coupled spherical harmonics. We exploit this new method to confirm the tentatively proposed positive growth rate of the planar flow of Bachtiar et al. [4], thereby verifying a counter-example to the Zel’dovich anti-dynamo theorem in a spherical geometry.     

Quasi-<Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis><Superscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis></Superscript> norm orthogonal Galerkin expansions in sums of Jacobi polynomials

In the study of differential equations on [ − 1,1] subject to linear homogeneous boundary conditions of finite order, it is often expedient to represent the solution in a Galerkin expansion, that is, as a sum of basis functions, each of which satisfies the given boundary conditions. In order that the functions be maximally distinct, one can use the Gram-Schmidt method to generate a set orthogonal with respect to a particular weight function. Here we consider all such sets associated with the Jacobi weight function, w(x) = (1 − x) ^α (1 + x) ^β . However, this procedure is not only cumbersome for sets of large degree, but does not provide any intrinsic means to characterize the functions that result. We show here that each basis function can be written as the sum of a small number of Jacobi polynomials, whose coefficients are found by imposing the boundary conditions and orthogonality to the first few basis functions only. That orthogonality of the entire set follows—a property we term “auto-orthogonality”—is remarkable. Additionally, these basis functions are shown to behave asymptotically like individual Jacobi polynomials and share many of the latter’s useful properties. Of particular note is that these basis sets retain the exponential convergence characteristic of Jacobi expansions for expansion of an arbitrary function satisfying the boundary conditions imposed. Further, the associated error is asymptotically minimized in an L ^p(α) norm given the appropriate choice of α = β. The rich algebraic structure underlying these properties remains partially obscured by the rather difficult form of the non-standard weighted integrals of Jacobi polynomials upon which our analysis rests. Nevertheless, we are able to prove most of these results in specific cases and certain of the results in the general case. However a proof that such expansions can satisfy linear boundary conditions of arbitrary order and form appears extremely difficult.