Finite element approximation for the Bessel $(p,s)$-Laplacian

Abstract

We study the finite element approximation of the Dirichlet problem for the Bessel $(p,s)$-Laplacian, $\operatorname{div}^{s} \left(|\nabla^{s} u|^{p-2}\nabla^{s} u\right)$, built from the Riesz fractional gradient $\nabla^s$ and posed on the Bessel potential space $X^{s,p}$, obtained by complex interpolation between $L^p$ and $W^{1,p}$. For $p = 2$ this operator reduces to the fractional Laplacian, while for $p \neq 2$ it differs from the fractional $p$-Laplacian arising from real interpolation. Since a direct Galerkin discretization requires reassembling a dense stiffness matrix at every nonlinear iteration, we propose an augmented Lagrangian formulation based on the projected fractional gradient $B_h = \mathbf{\Pi}_h \nabla^s$, in which the only dense matrix is assembled once and the nonlinearity decouples elementwise. We analyze the resulting consistency error, establish a priori convergence rates in $X^{s,p}$, conditional on a discrete inf-sup condition for the augmented Lagrangian scheme, and present numerical experiments that illustrate the convergence of the method and its ability to deal with degenerate and strongly nonlinear problems.