An Auxiliary Space Preconditioner for Fractional Laplacian of Negative Order

Abstract: Coupled multiphysics problems often give rise to interface conditions naturally formulated in fractional Sobolev spaces. Here, both positive and negative fractionality are common. When designing efficient solvers for discretizations of such problems it would then be useful to have a preconditioner for the fractional Laplacian, $(-\Delta)^s$, with $s \in [-1,1]$. Previously, additive multigrid preconditioners for the case when $s \geq 0$ have been proposed. In this work we complement this construction with auxiliary space preconditioners suitable when $s \leq 0$. These preconditioners are shown to be spectrally equivalent to $(-\Delta)^{-s}$, but requires preconditioners for fractional $H(\operatorname{div})$ operators with positive fractionality. We design such operators based on an additive multigrid approach. We finish with some numerical experiments, verifying the theoretical results.