Two-level hybrid Schwarz preconditioners with preasymptotic piecewise-polynomial coarse spaces for the high-frequency Helmholtz equation

Abstract: We consider two-level hybrid Schwarz domain-decomposition preconditioners for finite element discretizations of the high-frequency Helmholtz equation (with wavenumber $k$). To date, all existing $k$-explicit theory for these preconditioners considers coarse spaces in the $\textit{asymptotic regime}$, i.e., where the Galerkin solution is $k$-uniformly quasi-optimal. We consider the situation where the fine and coarse spaces consist, respectively, of piecewise polynomials of degree $p$ on meshes of width $h$ and $H_c$. We prove results for the coarse space in the $\textit{preasymptotic regime}$, under the familiar mesh threshold that $(H_c k)^{2p} ρ(k)$ is sufficiently small, where $ρ(k)$ is the norm of the solution operator (such that $ρ(k)\sim k$ for the Helmholtz equation in free space). We prove that, in this regime, the fixed-point iteration with this preconditioner converges in a number of iterations that grows at most like $\log k$. We give numerical experiments demonstrating this theory. Furthermore, these experiments indicate that our theoretical results are sharp, in that the number of iterations required for these preconditioners to converge with $(H_c k)^{2p} ρ(k) \gg 1$ grows rapidly with $k$.