A Remark on Disk Packings and Numerical Integration of Harmonic Functions

Abstract

We are interested in the following problem: given an open, bounded domain $Ω\subset \mathbb{R}^2$, what is the largest constant $α= α(Ω) > 0$ such that there exist an infinite sequence of disks $B_1, B_2, \dots, B_N, \dots \subset \mathbb{R}^2$ and a sequence $(n_i)$ with $n_i \in \left\{1,2\right\}$ such that $$ \sup_{N \in \mathbb{N}}{N^α\left\| χ_Ω - \sum_{i=1}^{N}{(-1)^{n_i}χ_{B_i}}\right\|_{L^1(\mathbb{R}^2)}} < \infty,$$ where $χ$ denotes the characteristic function? We prove that certain (somewhat peculiar) domains $Ω\subset \mathbb{R}^2$ satisfy the property with $α= 0.53$. For these domains there exists a sequence of points $(x_i)_{i=1}^{\infty}$ in $Ω$ with weights $(a_i)_{i=1}^{\infty}$ such that for all harmonic functions $u:\mathbb{R}^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ $$ \left|\int_Ω{u(x)dx} - \sum_{i=1}^{N}{a_i u(x_i)}\right| \leq C_Ω\frac{\|u\|_{L^{\infty}(Ω)}}{N^{0.53}},$$ where $C_Ω$ depends only on $Ω$. This gives a Quasi-Monte-Carlo method for harmonic functions which improves on the probabilistic Monte-Carlo bound $\|u\|_{L^{2}(Ω)}/N^{0.5}$ \textit{without} introducing a dependence on the total variation. We do not know which decay rates are optimal.