Abstract

We consider fractional Sobolev spaces Hθ(Γ), θ∈ [0, 1] on a 2D surface Γ. We show that functions in Hθ(Γ) can be decomposed into contributions with local support in a stable way. Stability of the decomposition is inherited by piecewise polynomial subspaces. Applications include the analysis of additive Schwarz preconditioners for discretizations of the hypersingular integral operator by the p-version of the boundary element method with condition number bounds that are uniform in the polynomial degree p.