Abstract
It has recently been demonstrated (Frauendiener and Hennig 2014 Class. Quantum Grav. 31 085010) that the conformally invariant wave equation on a Minkowski background can be solved with a fully pseudospectral numerical method. In particular, it is possible to include spacelike infinity into the numerical domain, which is appropriately represented as a cylinder, and highly accurate numerical solutions can be obtained with a moderate number of gridpoints. In this paper, we generalise these considerations to the spherically-symmetric wave equation on a Schwarzschild background. In the Minkowski case, a logarithmic singularity at the future boundary is present at leading order, which can easily be removed to obtain completely regular solutions. An important new feature of the Schwarzschild background is that the corresponding solutions develop logarithmic singularities at infinitely many orders. This behaviour seems to be characteristic for massive space-times. In this sense this work is indicative of properties of the solutions of the Einstein equations near spatial infinity. The use of fully pseudospectral methods allows us to still obtain very accurate numerical solutions, and the convergence properties of the spectral approximations reveal details about the singular nature of the solutions on spacelike and null infinity. These results seem to be impossible to achieve with other current numerical methods. Moreover, we describe how to impose conditions on the asymptotic behaviour of initial data so that the leading-order logarithmic terms are avoided, which further improves the numerical accuracy.