Gradient flow finite element discretizations with energy-based adaptivity for the Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Abstract We present an effective adaptive procedure for the numerical approximation of the steady-state Gross–Pitaevskii equation. Our approach is solely based on energy minimization, and consists of a combination of a novel adaptive finite element mesh refinement technique, which does not rely on any a posteriori error estimates, and a recently proposed new gradient flow. Numerical tests show that this strategy is able to provide highly accurate results, with optimal convergence rates with respect to the number of freedom.