Decompositions of high-frequency Helmholtz solutions via functional calculus, and application to the finite element method

Over the last ten years, results from [48], [49], [22], and [47] decomposing high-frequency Helmholtz solutions into “low”- and “high”-frequency components have had a large impact in the numerical analysis of the Helmholtz equation. These results have been proved for the constant-coefficient Helmholtz equation in either the exterior of a Dirichlet obstacle or an interior domain with an impedance boundary condition. Using the Helffer–Sj¨ostrand functional calculus [33], this paper proves analogous decompositions for scattering problems fitting into the black-box scattering framework of Sj¨ostrandZworski [63], thus covering Helmholtz problems with variable coefficients, impenetrable obstacles, and penetrable obstacles all at once. These results allow us to prove new frequency-explicit convergence results for (i) the hpf inite-element method (hp-FEM) applied to the variable-coefficient Helmholtz equation in the exterior of an analytic Dirichlet obstacle, where the coefficients are analytic in a neighbourhood of the obstacle, and (ii) the h-FEM applied to the Helmholtz penetrable-obstacle transmission problem. In particular, the result in (i) shows that the hp-FEM applied to this problem does not suffer from the pollution effect.