Isogeometric collocation method for the fractional Laplacian in the 2D bounded domain

Abstract We consider the isogeometric analysis for fractional PDEs involving the fractional Laplacian in two dimensions. An isogeometric collocation method is developed to discretize the fractional Laplacian and applied to the fractional Poisson problem and the time-dependent fractional porous media equation. Numerical studies exhibit monotonous convergence with a rate of O ( N − 1 ) , where N is the degrees of freedom. A comparison with finite element analysis shows that the method enjoys higher accuracy per degree of freedom and has better convergence rate. We demonstrate that isogeometric analysis offers a novel and promising computational tool for nonlocal problems.