arXiv:2610.09909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a novel unfitted finite element method based on polynomial splines over hierarchical T-meshes (PHT-splines) for elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) posed on domains whose boundaries are described implicitly by a level-set function. Exploiting the enhanced smoothness of the spline space, we formulate the method by minimizing the $L^2$ residual of the PDE over an extended neighborhood of the physical domain. This formulation allows the method to be implemented entirely on the background mesh using standard element-wise quadrature. It yields a symmetric positive-definite linear system and avoids the geometric construction of curved cut subregions in boundary elements, as well as the associated nontrivial numerical integration. We establish well-posedness of the numerical scheme and derive optimal \emph{a priori} error estimates in the $H^1$ norm. In addition, we employ a residual-based \emph{a posteriori} error indicator to guide local adaptive refinement of the hierarchical T-meshes. Numerical experiments corroborate the theoretical results and demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach.