Contraction and Optimality Properties of an Adaptive Legendre–Galerkin Method: The Multi-Dimensional Case

We analyze the theoretical properties of an adaptive Legendre–Galerkin method in the multidimensional case. After the recent investigations for Fourier–Galerkin methods in a periodic box and for Legendre–Galerkin methods in the one dimensional setting, the present study represents a further step towards a mathematically rigorous understanding of adaptive spectral/$$hp$$hp discretizations of elliptic boundary-value problems. The main contribution of the paper is a careful construction of a multidimensional Riesz basis in H1, based on a quasi-orthonormalization procedure. This allows us to design an adaptive algorithm, to prove its convergence by a contraction argument, and to discuss its optimality properties (in the sense of non-linear approximation theory) in certain sparsity classes of Gevrey typ