An accelerated alternating procedure for the Cauchy problem for the Helmholtz equation

In this paper we study the Cauchy problem for the Helmholtz equation. This problem appears in various applications and is severely ill-posed. The modified alternating procedure has been proposed by the authors for solving this problem but the convergence has been rather slow. We demonstrate how to instead use conjugate gradient methods for accelerating the convergence. The main idea is to introduce an artificial boundary in the interior of the domain. This addition of the interior boundary allows us to derive an inner product that is natural for the application and that gives us a proper framework for implementing the steps of the conjugate gradient methods. The numerical results performed using the finite difference method show that the conjugate gradient based methods converge considerably faster than the modified alternating iterative procedure studied previously.