An Easy-To-Use Tool to Solve Differential Equations with the Fractional Laplacian

Numerical simulation of fractional-order partial differential equations is a challenging task and the majority of computing environments does not provide support for these problems. In this paper we describe how to exploit some of the Matlab features (a programming language not supporting fractional calculus in a naive way) to solve partial differential equations with the spectral fractional Laplacian. For shortness we focus on fractional Poisson equations but the proposed approach can be extended, with just some technical difficulties, to more involved problems. This approach cannot be considered as a highly efficient and accurate way to solve fractional partial differential equations, but as an easy-to-use tool for non specialists in numerical computation to obtain solutions without having to produce sophisticated numerical codes.