A class of difference schemes with flexible local approximation

Solutions of many physical problems have salient local features that are qualitatively known a priori (for example, singularities at point sources, edge and corners; boundary layers; derivative jumps at material interfaces; strong dipole field components near polarized spherical particles; cusps of electronic wavefunctions at the nuclei; electrostatic double layers around colloidal particles, etc.) The known methods capable of providing flexible local approximation of such features include the generalized finite element – partition of unity method, special variational-difference schemes in broken Sobolev spaces, and a few other specialized techniques. In the proposed new class of Flexible Local Approximation MEthods (FLAME), a desirable set of local approximating functions (such as cylindrical or spherical harmonics, plane waves, harmonic polynomials, etc.) defines a finite difference scheme on a chosen grid stencil. One motivation is to minimize the notorious ‘staircase’ effect at curved and slanted interface boundaries. However, the new approach has much broader applications. As illustrative examples, the paper presents arbitrarily high order 3-point schemes for the 1D Schrödinger equation and a 1D singular equation, schemes for electrostatic interactions of colloidal particles, electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering, plasmon resonances. Moreover, many classical finite difference schemes, including the Collatz “Mehrstellen” schemes, are direct particular cases of FLAME.