Abstract
This paper introduces a high-order time stepping scheme, that is based on using Fourier spectral in space and a fourth-order diagonal Padé approximation to the matrix exponential function for solving multi-dimensional space-fractional reaction–diffusion equations. The resulting time stepping scheme is developed based on an exponential time differencing approach such that it alleviates solving a large non-linear system at each time step while maintaining the stability of the scheme. The non-locality of the fractional operator in some other numerical schemes for these equations leads to full and dense matrices. This scheme is able to overcome such computational inefficiency due to the full diagonal representation of the fractional operator. It also attains spectral convergence for multiple spatial dimensions. The stability of the scheme is discussed through the investigation of the amplification symbol and plotting its stability regions, which provides an indication of the stability of the method. The convergence analysis is performed empirically to show that the scheme is fourth-order accurate in time, as expected. Numerical experiments on reaction–diffusion systems with application to pattern formation are discussed to show the effect of the fractional order in space-fractional reaction–diffusion equations and to validate the effectiveness of the scheme.