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Wavenumber explicit convergence of a multiscale generalized finite element method for heterogeneous Helmholtz problems

In this paper, a generalized finite element method (GFEM) with optimal local approximation spaces for solving high-frequency heterogeneous Helmholtz problems is systematically studied. The local spaces are built from selected eigenvectors of carefully designed local eigenvalue problems defined on generalized harmonic spaces. At both continuous and discrete levels, $(i)$ wavenumber explicit and nearly exponential decay rates for local and global approximation errors are obtained without any assumption on the size of subdomains; $(ii)$ a quasi-optimal convergence of the method is established by assuming that the size of subdomains is $O(1/k)$ ($k$ is the wavenumber). A novel resonance effect between the wavenumber and the dimension of local spaces on the decay of error with respect to the oversampling size is implied by the analysis. Furthermore, for fixed dimensions of local spaces, the discrete local errors are proved to converge as $h\rightarrow 0$ ($h$ denoting the mesh size) towards the continuous local errors. The method at the continuous level extends the plane wave partition of unity method [I. Babuska and J. M. Melenk, Int.\;J.\;Numer.\;Methods Eng., 40 (1997), pp.~727--758] to the heterogeneous-coefficients case, and at the discrete level, it delivers an efficient non-iterative domain decomposition method for solving discrete Helmholtz problems resulting from standard FE discretizations. Numerical results are provided to confirm the theoretical analysis and to validate the proposed method.