Boundary integral exterior calculus

Abstract

We report a surprising and deep structural property of boundary integral operators occurring in first-kind boundary integral equations associated with Hodge–Dirac and Hodge–Laplace operators for de Rham Hilbert complexes on a bounded domain $\Omega$ in a Riemannian manifold. We show that, as regards their induced bilinear forms, those boundary integral operators are Hodge–Dirac and Hodge–Laplace operators in the weak sense, this time set in a trace de Rham Hilbert complex on the boundary $\partial \Omega$ whose underlying spaces of differential forms are equipped with non-local inner products defined through layer potentials. On the way to this main result we conduct a thorough analysis of layer potentials in operator-induced trace spaces and derive representation formulas.