Convergence of HX Preconditioner for Maxwell's Equations with Jump Coefficients (i): Various Extensions of The Regular Helmholtz Decomposition

Abstract: This paper is the first one of two serial articles, whose goal is to prove convergence of HX Preconditioner (proposed by Hiptmair and Xu 2007) for Maxwell's equations with jump coefficients. In this paper we establish various extensions of the regular Helmholtz decomposition for edge finite element functions defined in three dimensional domains. The functions defined by the regular Helmholtz decompositions can preserve the zero tangential complement on faces and edges of polyhedral domains and some non-Lipchitz domains, and possess stability estimates with only a $logarithm$ factor. These regular Helmholtz decompositions will be used to prove convergence of the HX preconditioner for Maxwell's equations with jump coefficients in another paper (Hu 2017).