Elliptic interface problem approximated by CutFEM: I. Conservative flux recovery and numerical validation of adaptive mesh refinement

Abstract

We study an elliptic interface problem with discontinuous diffusion coefficients on unfitted meshes using the CutFEM method. Our main contribution is the reconstruction of conservative fluxes from the CutFEM solution and their use in a posteriori error estimation. We introduce a hybrid mixed formulation with locally computable Lagrange multipliers and reconstruct the flux in the immersed Raviart-Thomas space. Based on this, we propose a new a posteriori error estimator that includes both volume and interface terms. We state its robust reliability and local efficiency, and validate the approach through numerical experiments.