Intergrid transfer operators and multilevel preconditioners for nonconforming discretizations (Q676142)

In order to deal with the coercive bilinear forms that arise in the variational formulation of second- and fourth-order linear elliptic problems, nonconforming discretizations with multilevel preconditioners of hierarchical bases have been introduced in recent years; a closely related approach has been proposed by \textit{J.-H. Bramble, J. E. Pasciak} and \textit{J. Xu} [Math. Comput. 55, No. 191, 1-22 (1990; Zbl 0703.65076)]. Among other things, the author of this paper presents a unified convergence theory for both approaches, in terms of the discrete norm of a convenient additive subspace splitting, which puts in evidence the important role played by the iterated coarse to fine grids extension operators; moreover, it is shown that the condition number of the additive Schwarz operator associated with the subspace splitting has simple lower and upper bounds in terms of the energy norms of the extension operators. The paper also illustrates extensively the application of its results; the discussion and numerical examples include the standard (nonconforming) P1 finite elements in the case of second-order problems and the Morley element when the order is four.