Conforming lifting and adjoint consistency for the Discrete de Rham complex of differential forms

Discrete de Rham (DDR) methods provide non-conforming but compatible approximations of the continuous de Rham complex on general polytopal meshes. Owing to the non-conformity, several challenges arise in the analysis of these methods. In this work, we design conforming liftings on the DDR spaces, that are right-inverse of the interpolators and can be used to solve some of these challenges. We illustrate this by tackling the question of the global integration-by-part formula. By non-conformity of the discrete complex, this formula involves a residual -- which can be interpreted as a consistency error on the adjoint of the discrete exterior derivative -- on which we obtain, using the conforming lifting, an optimal bound in terms of the mesh size. Our analysis is carried out in the polytopal exterior calculus framework, which allows for unified proofs for all the spaces and operators in the DDR complex. Moreover, the liftings are explicitly constructed in finite element spaces on a simplicial submesh of the underlying polytopal mesh, which gives more control on the resulting functions (e.g., discrete trace and inverse inequalities).