Two-level Restricted Additive Schwarz preconditioner based on Multiscale Spectral Generalized FEM for Heterogeneous Helmholtz Problems

We present and analyze a two-level restricted additive Schwarz (RAS) preconditioner for heterogeneous Helmholtz problems, based on a multiscale spectral generalized finite element method (MS-GFEM) proposed in [C. Ma, C. Alber, and R. Scheichl, SIAM. J. Numer. Anal., 61 (2023), pp. 1546--1584]. The preconditioner uses local solves with impedance boundary conditions, and a global coarse solve based on the MS-GFEM approximation space constructed from local eigenproblems. It is derived by first formulating MS-GFEM as a Richardson iterative method, and without using an oversampling technique, reduces to the preconditioner recently proposed and analyzed in [Q. Hu and Z.Li, arXiv 2402.06905]. We prove that both the Richardson iterative method and the preconditioner used within GMRES converge at a rate of $\Lambda$ under some reasonable conditions, where $\Lambda$ denotes the error of the underlying MS-GFEM \rs{approximation}. Notably, the convergence proof of GMRES does not rely on the `Elman theory'. An exponential convergence property of MS-GFEM, resulting from oversampling, ensures that only a few iterations are needed for convergence with a small coarse space. Moreover, the convergence rate $\Lambda$ is not only independent of the fine-mesh size $h$ and the number of subdomains, but decays with increasing wavenumber $k$. In particular, in the constant-coefficient case, with $h\sim k^{-1-\gamma}$ for some $\gamma\in (0,1]$, it holds that $\Lambda \sim k^{-1+\frac{\gamma}{2}}$. We present extensive numerical experiments to illustrate the performance of the preconditioner, including 2D and 3D benchmark geophysics tests, and a high-contrast coefficient example arising in applications.