We propose a novel and simple spectral method based on the semi-discrete Fourier transforms to discretize the fractional Laplacian $(-\Delta)^\frac{\alpha}{2}$. Numerical analysis and experiments are provided to study its performance. Our method has the same symbol $|\xi|^\alpha$ as the fractional Laplacian $(-\Delta)^\frac{\alpha}{2}$ at the discrete level, and thus it can be viewed as the exact discrete analogue of the fractional Laplacian. This {\it unique feature} distinguishes our method from other existing methods for the fractional Laplacian. Note that our method is different from the Fourier pseudospectral methods in the literature, which are usually limited to periodic boundary conditions (see Remark \ref{remark0}). Numerical analysis shows that our method can achieve a spectral accuracy. The stability and convergence of our method in solving the fractional Poisson equations were analyzed. Our scheme yields a multilevel Toeplitz stiffness matrix, and thus fast algorithms can be developed for efficient matrix-vector products. The computational complexity is ${\mathcal O}(2N\log(2N))$, and the memory storage is ${\mathcal O}(N)$ with $N$ the total number of points. Extensive numerical experiments verify our analytical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in solving various problems.

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