A posteriori error estimates for energy-based atomistic/continuum method for multi-body interaction systems

Abstract:

We derive the a posterior error estimate for an energy-based atomistic/continuum method for a one-dimensional periodic chain with multi-body interactions. The current extends previous results by eliminating the requirement that the computational nodes in the continuum region coincide with the lattice sites and providing a thorough stability analysis. Based on the estimator, we design an adaptive refinement algorithm which produces the optimal convergence rate. We also show numerically that error estimator is efficient.