An auxiliary space multigrid preconditioner for the weak Galerkin method

Abstract: In this paper, the authors constructed an auxiliary space multigrid preconditioner for the weak Galerkin finite element method for second-order diffusion equations, discretized on simplicial 2D or 3D meshes. The idea of the auxiliary space multigrid preconditioner is to use an auxiliary space as a "coarse" space in the multigrid algorithm, where the discrete problem in the auxiliary space can be easily solved by an existing solver. In this construction, the authors conveniently use the $H^1$ conforming piecewise linear finite element space as an auxiliary space. The main technical difficulty is to build the connection between the weak Galerkin discrete space and the $H^1$ conforming piecewise linear finite element space. The authors successfully constructed such an auxiliary space multigrid preconditioner for the weak Galerkin method, as well as a reduced system of the weak Galerkin method involving only the degrees of freedom on edges/faces. The preconditioned systems are proved to have condition numbers independent of the mesh size. Numerical experiments are conducted to support the theoretical results.