English

The $hp$-FEM does not suffer from the pollution effect for piecewise-smooth Helmholtz problems with Gevrey regularity at boundaries

Numerical Analysis 2026-07-17 v1

Abstract

We consider the hphp-FEM applied to the Helmholtz scattering problem with wavenumber kk, truncated with a perfectly-matched layer. The scatterer consists of a combination of Dirichlet, Neumann, and penetrable obstacles together with variable coefficients. Provided that the Helmholtz solution operator is polynomially bounded in kk, all coefficients are piecewise smooth, all boundary surfaces are Gevrey and all coefficients restricted to boundary surfaces are Gevrey together with all their normal derivatives, we show that the hphp-FEM is quasioptimal when p1+εlogkp\geq 1+\varepsilon \log k and hk/phk/p is sufficiently small; i.e., the hphp-FEM does not suffer from the pollution effect. This result generalises the analogous results in both [Bernkopf, Chaumont-Frelet, Melenk 2025] (proved for piecewise analytic coefficients and analytic boundaries) and [Galkowski, Lafontaine, Spence, Wunsch 2024] (proved for smooth coefficients that are analytic near analytic obstacles) to a much larger class of scatterers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.16073,
  title  = {The $hp$-FEM does not suffer from the pollution effect for piecewise-smooth Helmholtz problems with Gevrey regularity at boundaries},
  author = {Jeffrey Galkowski and Mostafa Meliani and Euan A. Spence},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16073},
  year   = {2026}
}