Meshfree finite difference solution of homogeneous Dirichlet problems of the fractional Laplacian

A so-called grid-overlay finite difference method (GoFD) was proposed recently for the numerical solution of homogeneous Dirichlet boundary value problems of the fractional Laplacian on arbitrary bounded domains. It was shown to have advantages of both finite difference and finite element methods, including its efficient implementation through the fast Fourier transform and ability to work for complex domains and with mesh adaptation. The purpose of this work is to study GoFD in a meshfree setting, a key to which is to construct the data transfer matrix from a given point cloud to a uniform grid. Two approaches are proposed, one based on the moving least squares fitting and the other based on the Delaunay triangulation and piecewise linear interpolation. Numerical results obtained for examples with convex and concave domains and various types of point clouds are presented. They show that both approaches lead to comparable results. Moreover, the resulting meshfree GoFD converges at a similar order as GoFD with unstructured meshes and finite element approximation as the number of points in the cloud increases. Furthermore, numerical results show that the method is robust to random perturbations in the location of the points.