A space-time spectral method for the 1-D Maxwell equation

Abstract

A Legendre-tau space-time spectral method is established for the 1-D Maxwell equation. The polynomials of different degrees are used to approximate the electric and magnetic fields, respectively, so that they can be decoupled in computation. Also, the time multi-interval Legendre-tau space-time spectral method is considered to keep the long-time computation stable. Error estimates for the method of single and multi-internal are given, respectively. Moreover, the space-time spectral method is applied to the numerical solutions of the 1-D nonlinear Maxwell equation and describes its implicit-explicit iteration scheme. Numerical examples are compared with some other methods, which verifies the effectiveness of the methods for the 1-D Maxwell equation.

Keywords

• maxwell equation
• space-time spectral method
• legendre polynomial
• interval decomposition
• error estimate