Optimal preconditioners for the p-Version of the fem

In this paper, we consider domain decomposition preconditioners for a system of linear algebraic equations arising from the p-version of the fem. We propose several multi-level preconditioners for the Dirichlet problems in the sub-domains in two and three dimensions. It is proved that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded by a constant independent of the polynomial degree. The proof uses interpretations of the p-version element stiffness matrix and mass matrix on [-1, 1] as h-version stiffness matrix and weighted mass matrix. The analysis requires wavelet methods.