Computing the lower and upper bounds of Laplace eigenvalue problem: By combining conforming and nonconforming finite element methods

Abstract

We introduce some ways to compute the lower and upper bounds of the Laplace eigenvalue problem. By using the special nonconforming finite elements, i.e., enriched Crouzeix-Raviart element and extended Q 1rot, we get the lower bound of the eigenvalue. Additionally, we use conforming finite elements to do the postprocessing to get the upper bound of the eigenvalue, which only needs to solve the corresponding source problems and a small eigenvalue problem if higher order postprocessing method is implemented. Thus, we can obtain the lower and upper bounds of the eigenvalues simultaneously by solving eigenvalue problem only once. Some numerical results are also presented to demonstrate our theoretical analysis. © 2012 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.