Quasi-Trefftz spaces for the first-order time-harmonic Maxwell's equations

Abstract

The goal of this article is to study optimal high-order Taylor-based polynomial quasi-Trefftz spaces for first-order time-harmonic Maxwell's equations. Compared with standard polynomial spaces, the purpose of quasi-Trefftz spaces is to retain the same high-order best approximation property but more efficiently: their dimension is considerably smaller. To achieve this goal, they approximate only smooth solutions to the governing equation rather than to approximate general smooth functions. While there is a natural definition of Taylor-based polynomial quasi-Trefftz spaces for scalar equations, the situation is fundamentally different for vector-valued equations, as the naive quasi-Trefftz property does not systematically define the smallest space with the desired best approximation property. This article identifies the optimal quasi-Trefftz spaces for first-order time-harmonic Maxwell's equations, proposes two approaches to construct quasi-Trefftz bases, and proves the spaces' best approximation property. The theoretical results, which strongly leverage polynomial Helmholtz decompositions and the exactness of the polynomial de Rham sequences, are validated with numerical experiments.