Optimal error analysis of a FEM for fractional diffusion problems by energy arguments (Q1703070)

The authors are interested in the numerical solution of time-fractional diffusion equations on bounded convex domains. The piecewise-linear finite element method is applied to approximate the solution. Using a careful energy analysis based on the repeated use of an integral operator with \(t^m\) type of weights the a priori error bounds for the semidiscrete finite element method are derived. These error estimates are shown to be optimal in \(L^2(\Omega)\) and \(H^1(\Omega)\) norms, and a quasi-optimal in \(L^\infty(\Omega)\)-norm. Numerical results are shown supporting the theoretical results.