Stabilization of High Order Cut Finite Element Methods on Surfaces

Abstract: We develop and analyze a stabilization term for cut finite element approximations of an elliptic second order partial differential equation on a surface embedded in $\mathbb{R}^d$. The new stabilization term combines properly scaled normal derivatives at the surface together with control of the jump in the normal derivatives across faces and provides control of the variation of the finite element solution on the active three dimensional elements that intersect the surface. We show that the condition number of the stiffness matrix is $O(h^{-2})$, where $h$ is the mesh parameter. The stabilization term works for linear as well as for higher-order elements and the derivation of its stabilizing properties is quite straightforward, which we illustrate by discussing the extension of the analysis to general $n$-dimensional smooth manifolds embedded in $\mathbb{R}^d$, with codimension $d-n$. We also formulate properties of a general stabilization term that are sufficient to prove optimal scaling of the condition number and optimal error estimates in energy- and $L^2$-norm. We finally present numerical studies confirming our theoretical results.