A fast Fourier transform based direct solver for the Helmholtz problem

This paper is devoted to the efficient numerical solution of the Helmholtz equation in a two- or three-dimensional rectangular domain with an absorbing boundary condition (ABC). The Helmholtz problem is discretized by standard bilinear and trilinear finite elements on an orthogonal mesh yielding a separable system of linear equations. The main key to high performance is to employ the Fast Fourier transform (FFT) within a fast direct solver to solve the large separable systems. The computational complexity of the proposed FFT based direct solver is O(N log N) operations. Numerical results for both two- and three-dimensional problems are presented confirming the efficiency of the method discussed.