NSNO: Neumann Series Neural Operator for Solving Helmholtz Equations in Inhomogeneous Medium

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Neumann Series Neural Operator (NSNO) to learn the solution operator of Helmholtz equation from inhomogeneity coefficients and source terms to solutions. Helmholtz equation is a crucial partial differential equation (PDE) with applications in various scientific and engineering fields. However, efficient solver of Helmholtz equation is still a big challenge especially in the case of high wavenumber. Recently, deep learning has shown great potential in solving PDEs especially in learning solution operators. Inspired by Neumann series in Helmholtz equation, we design a novel network architecture in which U-Net is embedded inside to capture the multiscale feature. Extensive experiments show that the proposed NSNO significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art FNO with at least 60\% lower relative $L^2$-error, especially in the large wavenumber case, and has 50\% lower computational cost and less data requirement. Moreover, NSNO can be used as the surrogate model in inverse scattering problems. Numerical tests show that NSNO is able to give comparable results with traditional finite difference forward solver while the computational cost is reduced tremendously.