On stability of discretizations of the Helmholtz equation (extended version)

We review the stability properties of several discretizations of the Helmholtz equation at large wavenumbers. For a model problem in a polygon, a complete $k$-explicit stability (including $k$-explicit stability of the continuous problem) and convergence theory for high order finite element methods is developed. In particular, quasi-optimality is shown for a fixed number of degrees of freedom per wavelength if the mesh size $h$ and the approximation order $p$ are selected such that $kh/p$ is sufficiently small and $p = O(\log k)$, and, additionally, appropriate mesh refinement is used near the vertices. We also review the stability properties of two classes of numerical schemes that use piecewise solutions of the homogeneous Helmholtz equation, namely, Least Squares methods and Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. The latter includes the Ultra Weak Variational Formulation

A Posteriori Error Estimation for Highly Indefinite Helmholtz Problems

We develop a new analysis for residual-type aposteriori error estimation for a class of highly indefinite elliptic boundary value problems by considering the Helmholtz equation at high wavenumber as our model problem. We employ a classical conforming Galerkin discretization by using hp-finite elements. In [Convergence analysis for finite element discretizations of the Helmholtz equation with Dirichlet-to-Neumann boundary conditions, Math. Comp., 79 (2010), pp.1871-1914], Melenk and Sauter introduced an hp-finite element discretization which leads to a stable and pollution-free discretization of the Helmholtz equation under a mild resolution condition which requires only degrees of freedom, where denotes the spatial dimension. In the present paper, we will introduce an aposteriori error estimator for this problem and prove its reliability and efficiency. The constants in these estimates become independent of the, possibly, high wavenumber provided the aforementioned resolution condition for stability is satisfied. We emphasize that, by using the classical theory, the constants in the aposteriori estimates would be amplified by a factor

Can coercive formulations lead to fast and accurate solution of the Helmholtz equation?

A new, coercive formulation of the Helmholtz equation was introduced in [Moiola, Spence, SIAM Rev. 2014]. In this paper we investigate $h$-version Galerkin discretisations of this formulation, and the iterative solution of the resulting linear systems. We find that the coercive formulation behaves similarly to the standard formulation in terms of the pollution effect (i.e. to maintain accuracy as $k\to\infty$, $h$ must decrease with $k$ at the same rate as for the standard formulation). We prove $k$-explicit bounds on the number of GMRES iterations required to solve the linear system of the new formulation when it is preconditioned with a prescribed symmetric positive-definite matrix. Even though the number of iterations grows with $k$, these are the first such rigorous bounds on the number of GMRES iterations for a preconditioned formulation of the Helmholtz equation, where the preconditioner is a symmetric positive-definite matrix.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figure

Stable Multiscale Petrov-Galerkin Finite Element Method for High Frequency Acoustic Scattering

We present and analyze a pollution-free Petrov-Galerkin multiscale finite element method for the Helmholtz problem with large wave number $\kappa$ as a variant of [Peterseim, ArXiv:1411.1944, 2014]. We use standard continuous $Q_1$ finite elements at a coarse discretization scale $H$ as trial functions, whereas the test functions are computed as the solutions of local problems at a finer scale $h$. The diameter of the support of the test functions behaves like $mH$ for some oversampling parameter $m$. Provided $m$ is of the order of $\log(\kappa)$ and $h$ is sufficiently small, the resulting method is stable and quasi-optimal in the regime where $H$ is proportional to $\kappa^{-1}$. In homogeneous (or more general periodic) media, the fine scale test functions depend only on local mesh-configurations. Therefore, the seemingly high cost for the computation of the test functions can be drastically reduced on structured meshes. We present numerical experiments in two and three space dimensions.Comment: The version coincides with v3. We only resized some figures which were difficult to process for certain printer

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

Mini-Workshop: Efficient and Robust Approximation of the Helmholtz Equation

The accurate and efficient treatment of wave propogation phenomena is still a challenging problem. A prototypical equation is the Helmholtz equation at high wavenumbers. For this equation, Babuška & Sauter showed in 2000 in their seminal SIAM Review paper that standard discretizations must fail in the sense that the ratio of true error and best approximation error has to grow with the frequency. This has spurred the development of alternative, non-standard discretization techniques. This workshop focused on evaluating and comparing these different approaches also with a view to their applicability to more general wave propagation problems