Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

We present a new class of $C^\infty$-smooth finite element spaces on Cartesian grids, based on a partition of unity approach. We use these spaces to construct smooth approximations of particle fields, i.e., finite sums of weighted Dirac deltas. In order to use the spaces on general domains, we propose a fictitious domain formulation, together with a new high-order accurate stabilization. Stability, convergence, and conservation properties of the scheme are established. Numerical experiments confirm the analysis and show that the Cartesian grid-size $\sigma$ should be taken proportional to the square-root of the particle spacing $h$, resulting in significant speed-ups in vortex methods.