Higher-order FEM and CIP-FEM for Helmholtz equation with high wave number and perfectly matched layer truncation

The high-frequency Helmholtz equation on the entire space is truncated into a bounded domain using the perfectly matched layer (PML) technique and subsequently, discretized by the higher-order finite element method (FEM) and the continuous interior penalty finite element method (CIP-FEM). By formulating an elliptic problem involving a linear combination of a finite number of eigenfunctions related to the PML differential operator, a wave-number-explicit decomposition lemma is proved for the PML problem, which implies that the PML solution can be decomposed into a non-oscillating elliptic part and an oscillating but analytic part. The preasymptotic error estimates in the energy norm for both the $p$-th order CIP-FEM and FEM are proved to be $C_1(kh)^p + C_2k(kh)^{2p} +C_3 E^{\rm PML}$ under the mesh condition that $k^{2p+1}h^{2p}$ is sufficiently small, where $k$ is the wave number, $h$ is the mesh size, and $E^{\rm PML}$ is the PML truncation error which is exponentially small. In particular, the dependences of coefficients $C_j~(j=1,2)$ on the source $f$ are improved. Numerical experiments are presented to validate the theoretical findings, illustrating that the higher-order CIP-FEM can greatly reduce the pollution errors

Sharp preasymptotic error bounds for the Helmholtz hh-FEM

In the analysis of the $h$-version of the finite-element method (FEM), with fixed polynomial degree $p$, applied to the Helmholtz equation with wavenumber $k\gg 1$, the $\textit{asymptotic regime}$ is when $(hk)^p C_{\rm sol}$ is sufficiently small and the sequence of Galerkin solutions are quasioptimal; here $C_{\rm sol}$ is the norm of the Helmholtz solution operator, normalised so that $C_{\rm sol} \sim k$ for nontrapping problems. In the $\textit{preasymptotic regime}$, one expects that if $(hk)^{2p}C_{\rm sol}$ is sufficiently small, then (for physical data) the relative error of the Galerkin solution is controllably small. In this paper, we prove the natural error bounds in the preasymptotic regime for the variable-coefficient Helmholtz equation in the exterior of a Dirichlet, or Neumann, or penetrable obstacle (or combinations of these) and with the radiation condition $\textit{either}$ realised exactly using the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map on the boundary of a ball $\textit{or}$ approximated either by a radial perfectly-matched layer (PML) or an impedance boundary condition. Previously, such bounds for $p>1$ were only available for Dirichlet obstacles with the radiation condition approximated by an impedance boundary condition. Our result is obtained via a novel generalisation of the "elliptic-projection" argument (the argument used to obtain the result for $p=1$) which can be applied to a wide variety of abstract Helmholtz-type problems

The hphp-FEM applied to the Helmholtz equation with PML truncation does not suffer from the pollution effect

We consider approximation of the variable-coefficient Helmholtz equation in the exterior of a Dirichlet obstacle using perfectly-matched-layer (PML) truncation; it is well known that this approximation is exponentially accurate in the PML width and the scaling angle, and the approximation was recently proved to be exponentially accurate in the wavenumber $k$ in [Galkowski, Lafontaine, Spence, 2021]. We show that the $hp$-FEM applied to this problem does not suffer from the pollution effect, in that there exist $C_1,C_2>0$ such that if $hk/p\leq C_1$ and $p \geq C_2 \log k$ then the Galerkin solutions are quasioptimal (with constant independent of $k$), under the following two conditions (i) the solution operator of the original Helmholtz problem is polynomially bounded in $k$ (which occurs for "most" $k$ by [Lafontaine, Spence, Wunsch, 2021]), and (ii) either there is no obstacle and the coefficients are smooth or the obstacle is analytic and the coefficients are analytic in a neighbourhood of the obstacle and smooth elsewhere. This $hp$-FEM result is obtained via a decomposition of the PML solution into "high-" and "low-frequency" components, analogous to the decomposition for the original Helmholtz solution recently proved in [Galkowski, Lafontaine, Spence, Wunsch, 2022]. The decomposition is obtained using tools from semiclassical analysis (i.e., the PDE techniques specifically designed for studying Helmholtz problems with large $k$).Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2102.1308

A simple proof that the hphp-FEM does not suffer from the pollution effect for the constant-coefficient full-space Helmholtz equation

In $d$ dimensions, approximating an arbitrary function oscillating with frequency $\lesssim k$ requires $\sim k^d$ degrees of freedom. A numerical method for solving the Helmholtz equation (with wavenumber $k$) suffers from the pollution effect if, as $k\to \infty$, the total number of degrees of freedom needed to maintain accuracy grows faster than this natural threshold. While the $h$-version of the finite element method (FEM) (where accuracy is increased by decreasing the meshwidth $h$ and keeping the polynomial degree $p$ fixed) suffers from the pollution effect, the celebrated papers [Melenk, Sauter 2010], [Melenk, Sauter 2011], [Esterhazy, Melenk 2012], and [Melenk, Parsania, Sauter 2013] showed that the $hp$-FEM (where accuracy is increased by decreasing the meshwidth $h$ and increasing the polynomial degree $p$) applied to a variety of constant-coefficient Helmholtz problems does not suffer from the pollution effect. The heart of the proofs of these results is a PDE result splitting the solution of the Helmholtz equation into "high" and "low" frequency components. In this expository paper we prove this splitting for the constant-coefficient Helmholtz equation in full space (i.e., in $\mathbb{R}^d$) using only integration by parts and elementary properties of the Fourier transform; this is in contrast to the proof for this set-up in [Melenk, Sauter 2010] which uses somewhat-involved bounds on Bessel and Hankel functions. The proof in this paper is motivated by the recent proof in [Lafontaine, Spence, Wunsch 2022] of this splitting for the variable-coefficient Helmholtz equation in full space; indeed, the proof in [Lafontaine, Spence, Wunsch 2022] uses more-sophisticated tools that reduce to the elementary ones above for constant coefficients

Perfectly-matched-layer truncation is exponentially accurate at high frequency

We consider a wide variety of scattering problems including scattering by Dirichlet, Neumann, and penetrable obstacles. We consider a radial perfectly-matched layer (PML) and show that for any PML width and a steep-enough scaling angle, the PML solution is exponentially close, both in frequency and the tangent of the scaling angle, to the true scattering solution. Moreover, for a fixed scaling angle and large enough PML width, the PML solution is exponentially close to the true scattering solution in both frequency and the PML width. In fact, the exponential bound holds with rate of decay c (omicrontanθ − C)k where omicron is the PML width and θ is the scaling angle. More generally, the results of the paper hold in the framework of black-box scattering under the assumption of an exponential bound on the norm of the cutoff resolvent, thus including problems with strong trapping. These are the first results on the exponential accuracy of PML at high-frequency with non-trivial scatterers