Discontinuous Galerkin methods for second-order elliptic PDE with low-regularity solutions (Q639395)

The authors consider the two-dimensional Poisson equation in a Lipschitzian domain along with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. They investigate the numerical solution (using the discontinuous Galerkin method both in the symmetric and the non-symmetric case and with inner penalty the parameter of which is sufficiently large) of this problem when the analytical solution is contained in \(W^{\ell+1,p},\,p\in(1,2]\), where \(\ell\geq 1\) is the polynomial degree of the discrete space. They then show that the convergence rate is optimal, namely \(\ell+1-2/p\), for the error taken in a norm connected to the bilinear form of the discrete problem. They also provide numerical results for the degrees \(\ell=1,2,3\) (but a solution in \(W^{2,p}\) only) and for the symmetric, the non-symmetric discontinuous Galerkin method and, for comparison, for the case of linear finite elements. Their experimental results (a convergence rate of \(2-2/p\) for the discontinuous Galerkin method, independently of \(\ell\)) are in accordance with their theory. The linear finite element method produces quite similar results here.