Circulant preconditioners for a kind of spatial fractional diffusion equations

In this paper, circulant preconditioners are studied for discretized matrices arising from finite difference schemes for a kind of spatial fractional diffusion equations. The fractional differential operator is comprised of left-sided and right-sided derivatives with order in (12,1)\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$(\frac {1}{2},1)$\end{document}. The resulting discretized matrices preserve Toeplitz-like structure and hence their matrix-vector multiplications can be computed efficiently by the fast Fourier transform. Theoretically, the spectra of the circulant preconditioned matrices are shown to be clustered around 1 under some conditions. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate that the preconditioning technique is very efficient.