Error estimates of exponential wave integrators for the Dirac equation in the massless and nonrelativistic regime

Abstract We present exponential wave integrator Fourier pseudospectral (EWI‐FP) methods and establish their error estimates of the fully discrete schemes for the Dirac equation in the massless and nonrelativistic regime. This regime involves a small dimensionless parameter where , and is inversely proportional to the speed of light. The solution exhibits highly oscillatory behavior in time and rapid wave propagation in space in this regime. Specifically, the time oscillations have a wavelength of , while the spatial oscillations have a wavelength of , with a wave speed of . We employ (symmetric) exponential wave integrators for temporal derivatives and Fourier spectral discretization for spatial derivatives. We rigorously derive the error bounds which explicitly depend on the mesh size , the time step and the small dimensionless parameter . The error estimates for the EWI‐FP methods demonstrate that their meshing strategy requirement (‐scalability) necessitates setting and when . Finally, some numerical examples are provided to validate the error bounds.