Tree-cotree gauging for two-dimensional hierarchical splines

Abstract: In magnetostatics and eddy current problems, formulated in terms of the magnetic vector potential, the solution is not unique, because the addition of an irrotational function to the solution remains a valid solution. The tree-cotree decomposition is a gauging technique to recover uniqueness when using finite elements, which consists in considering the mesh as a graph, and building a spanning tree on that graph. The idea has been recently extended to isogeometric analysis, applying the construction of the spanning tree on the control mesh, or equivalently, on the Greville grid. In the present paper we extend the construction to hierarchical splines, a set of splines with multi-level structure for adaptive refinement, by constructing a spanning tree for each single level. Since for degree $p=1$ the spaces of finite elements and hierarchical splines coincide, the presented construction is also valid for quadrilateral finite element meshes with hanging nodes. To assess the correctness of the method, we present numerical results for Maxwell eigenvalue problem.