THE NONCONFORMING VIRTUAL ELEMENT METHOD

Abstract. We introduce the nonconforming Virtual Element Method (VEM) for the ap-proximation of second order elliptic problems. We present the construction of the new element in two and three dimensions, highlighting the main differences with the conform-ing VEM and the classical nonconforming finite element methods. We provide the error analysis and establish the equivalence with a family of mimetic finite difference methods. 1