Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2017
The space fractional coupled nonlinear Schrödinger (CNLS) equations are discretized by an implicit conservative difference scheme with the fractional centered difference formula, which is unconditionally stable. The coefficient matrix of the discretized linear system is equal to the sum of a complex scaled identity matrix which can be written as the imaginary unit times the identity matrix and a symmetric Toeplitz-plusdiagonal matrix. In this paper, we present new preconditioners based on Hermitian and skew-Hermitian splitting (HSS) for such Toeplitz-like matrix. Theoretically, we show that all the eigenvalues of the resulting preconditioned matrices lie in the interior of the disk of radius 1 centered at the point (1,0). Thus Krylov subspace methods with the proposed preconditioners converge very fast. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed preconditioners.