Locally divergence-free discontinuous Galerkin methods for the Maxwell equations. (Q1427840)

This paper is devoted to the study of the role of discontinuous Galerkin methods in the numerical analysis of the two-dimensional Maxwell system \[ \frac{\partial H_x}{\partial t}=-\frac{\partial E_z}{\partial y},\quad \frac{\partial H_y}{\partial t}=\frac{\partial E_z}{\partial x},\quad \frac{\partial E_z}{\partial t}=\frac{\partial H_y}{\partial x}-\frac{\partial H_x}{\partial y}. \] First the locally divergence-free space is introduced and a numerical formulation of the algorithm is given. Next, it is described a way to measure the divergence of a piecewise smooth function, and the \(L^2\)-projection is defined from the space of locally divergence-free discontinuous piecewise polynomials to a subspace that contains the globally divergence-free piecewise polynomials. An abstract result on the \(L^2\)-stability and several error estimates are also given.