The nonlinear Schrödinger equation is an important model equation in the study of quantum states of physical systems. To improve the computing efficiency, a fast algorithm based on the time two-mesh high-order compact difference scheme for solving the nonlinear Schrödinger equation is studied. The fourth-order compact difference scheme is used to approximate the spatial derivatives and the time two-mesh method is designed for efficiently solving the resulting nonlinear system. Comparing to the existing time two-mesh algorithm, the novelty of the new algorithm is that the fine mesh solution, which becomes available, is also used as the initial guess of the linear system, which can improve the calculation accuracy of fine mesh solutions. Compared to the two-grid finite element methods (or finite difference methods) for nonlinear Schrödinger equations, the numerical calculation of this method is relatively simple, and its two-mesh algorithm is implemented in the temporal direction. Taking advantage of the discrete energy, the result with O(τC4+τF2+h4) in the discrete L2-norm is obtained. Here, τC and τF are the temporal parameters on the coarse and fine mesh, respectively, and h is the space step size. Finally, some numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate its efficiency and accuracy. The numerical results show that the new algorithm gives highly accurate results and preserves conservation laws of charge and energy. Furthermore, by comparing with the standard nonlinear implicit compact difference scheme, it can reduce the CPU time without loss of accuracy.
Keywords: conservation law; error estimate; high-order compact difference scheme; soliton; time two-mesh algorithm.