Boundary value problems on polyhedral domains and applications to numerical methods
Victor Nistor

 

Abstract:

I will first review some of the issues and earlier results on boundary value problems on polyhedral domains. The main lesson is that there is a 'loss of regularity' for boundary value problems on singular domains if the usual Sobolev spaces are used. This is inconvenient however in practical applications such as the Finite Element Method. An alternative approach is to use 'weighted Sobolev' spaces. Then one can then restore full regularity for elliptic problems on such domains under the additional condition of that there are no 'Newmann-Newmann' corners or edges (joint result with Bacuta, Mazzucato, and Zikatanov). The case of 'Newmann-Newmann' corners requires some additional ideas. I will then present some results in this case in two dimensions and how they can be used to construct quasi-optimal sequences of Finite Element Spaces for transmission and pure Neumann problems (joint work with Mazzucato and Li). This method is then generalized to three dimensions.