Finite element form-valued forms: Construction

Abstract

We provide a finite element discretization of $\ell$-form-valued $k$-forms on triangulation in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ for general $k$, $\ell$ and $n$ and any polynomial degree. The construction generalizes finite element Whitney forms for the de~Rham complex and their higher-order and distributional versions, the Regge finite elements and the Christiansen--Regge elasticity complex, the TDNNS element for symmetric stress tensors, the MCS element for traceless matrix fields, the Hellan--Herrmann--Johnson (HHJ) elements for biharmonic equations, and discrete divdiv and Hessian complexes in [Hu, Lin, and Zhang, 2025]. The construction discretizes the Bernstein--Gelfand--Gelfand (BGG) diagrams. Applications of the construction include discretization of strain and stress tensors in continuum mechanics and metric and curvature tensors in differential geometry in any dimension.