The complex-shifted Laplacian systems arising in a wide range of applications. In this work, we propose an absolute-value based preconditioner for solving the complex-shifted Laplacian system. In our approach, the complex-shifted Laplacian system is equivalently rewritten as a \(2\times 2\) block real linear system. With the Toeplitz structure of uniform-grid discretization of the constant-coefficient Laplacian operator, the absolute value of the block real matrix is fast invertible by means of fast sine transforms. For more general coefficient function, we then average the coefficient function and take the absolute value of the averaged matrix as our preconditioner. With assumptions on the complex shift, we theoretically prove that the eigenvalues of the preconditioned matrix in absolute value are upper and lower bounded by constants independent on the matrix size, indicating a matrix-size independent linear convergence rate of the MINRES solver. Interestingly, numerical results show that the proposed preconditioner is still efficient even if the assumptions on the complex shift are not met. The fast invertibility of the proposed preconditioner and the robust convergence rate of the preconditioned MINRES solver lead to a linearithmic (nearly optimal) complexity of the proposed solver. The proposed preconditioner is compared with several state-of-the-art preconditioners via several numerical examples to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed preconditioner.
