There is no pointwise consistent quasicontinuum energy

Abstract : Much work has gone into the construction of quasicontinuum energies that reduce the coupling error along the interface between atomistic and continuum regions. The largest consistency errors are typically pointwise $O(\frac{1}{\eps})$ errors, and in some cases this has been reduced to pointwise $O(1)$ errors. In this paper we show that one cannot create a coupling method using a finite-range coupling interface that has o(1)-consistency in the interface, and we use this to give an upper bound on the order of convergence in discrete $w^{1,p}$-norms in 1D.