Sonderforschungsbereich 393 Parallele Numerische Simulation für Physik und Kontinuumsmechanik

SFB393/05-01 January 2005 Abstract The Laplace-Beltrami operator corresponds to the Laplace operator on curved surfaces. In this paper, we consider an eigenvalue problem for the Laplace-Beltrami operator on subdomains of the unit sphere in R. We develop a residual a posteriori error estimator for the eigenpairs and derive a reliable estimate for the eigenvalues. A global parametrization of the spherical domains and a carefully chosen finite element discretization allows us to use an approach similar to the one for the two-dimensional case. In order to assure results in the quality of those for plane domains, weighted norms and an adapted Clément-type interpolation operator have to be introduced.