Uniform preconditioners of linear complexity for problems of negative order

We propose a multi-level type operator that can be used in the framework of operator (or Caldéron) preconditioning to construct uniform preconditioners for negative order operators discretized by piecewise polynomials on a family of possibly locally refined partitions. The cost of applying this multi-level operator scales linearly in the number of mesh cells. Therefore, it provides a uniform preconditioner that can be applied in linear complexity when used within the preconditioning framework from our earlier work [Uniform preconditioners for problems of negative order, Math. Comp. 89 (2020), 645–674].