01500nas a2200157   4500008004100000020001400041245006500055210006500120300001400185490000800199520103100207100001901238700001501257700002301272856004701295       2019                        eng d  a0945-324500aNumerical approximation of the integral fractional Laplacian0 aNumerical approximation of the integral fractional Laplacian  a235–2780 v1423 aWe propose a new nonconforming finite element algorithm to approximate the solution to the elliptic problem involving the fractional Laplacian. We first derive an integral representation of the bilinear form corresponding to the variational problem. The numerical approximation of the action of the corresponding stiffness matrix consists of three steps: (1) apply a sinc quadrature scheme to approximate the integral representation by a finite sum where each term involves the solution of an elliptic partial differential equation defined on the entire space, (2) truncate each elliptic problem to a bounded domain, (3) use the finite element method for the space approximation on each truncated domain. The consistency error analysis for the three steps is discussed together with the numerical implementation of the entire algorithm. The results of computations are given illustrating the error behavior in terms of the mesh size of the physical domain, the domain truncation parameter and the quadrature spacing parameter.1 aBonito, Andrea1 aLei, Wenyu1 aPasciak, Joseph, E  uhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s00211-019-01025-x