A Crank--Nicolson ADI Spectral Method for a Two-Dimensional Riesz Space Fractional Nonlinear Reaction-Diffusion Equation

In this paper, a new alternating direction implicit Galerkin-Legendre spectral method for the two-dimensional Riesz space fractional nonlinear reaction-diffusion equation is developed. The temporal component is discretized by the Crank-Nicolson method. The detailed implementation of the method is presented. The stability and convergence analysis is strictly proven, which shows that the derived method is stable and convergent of order 2 in time. An optimal error estimate in space is also obtained by introducing a new orthogonal projector. The present method is extended to solve the fractional FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis.