Comparison of Nonlocal Operators Utilizing Perturbation Analysis

We present a comparative study of integral operators used in nonlocal problems. The size of nonlocality is determined by the parameter ?. The authors recently discovered a way to incorporate local boundary conditions into nonlocal problems. We construct two nonlocal operators which satisfy local homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions. We compare the bulk and boundary behaviors of these two to the operator that enforces nonlocal boundary conditions. We construct approximations to each operator using perturbation expansions in the form of Taylor polynomials by consistently keeping the size of expansion neighborhood equal to ?. In the bulk, we show that one of these two operators exhibits similar behavior with the operator that enforces nonlocal boundary conditions