A lower bound for the worst-case cubature error on spheres of arbitrary dimension

This paper is concerned with numerical integration on the unit sphere S^r of dimension r≥2 in the Euclidean space ℝ^r+1. We consider the worst-case cubature error, denoted by E(Q_m;H^s(S^r)), of an arbitrary m-point cubature rule Q_m for functions in the unit ball of the Sobolev space H^s(S^r), where s>, and show that The positive constant c_s,r in the estimate depends only on the sphere dimension r≥2 and the index s of the Sobolev space H^s(S^r). This result was previously only known for r=2, in which case the estimate is order optimal. The method of proof is constructive: we construct for each Q_m a `bad' function f_m, that is, a function which vanishes in all nodes of the cubature rule and for which Our proof uses a packing of the sphere S^r with spherical caps, as well as an interpolation result between Sobolev spaces of different indices.