Superconvergence of discontinuous Galerkin methods for hyperbolic systems (Q2378249)

The authors discuss the convergence of discontinuous Galerkin methods for positive, symmetric linear hyperbolic systems in two dimensions. The methods are based on bilinear finite elements. For an almost uniform partition of a rectangular domain and \(H^3\) regularity of the solution, second order (super-)convergence in \(L^2\) is proven. This extends the well-known superconvergence \(O(h^{k+1})\) for \(k\)-th order finite elements for elliptic and parabolic problems to the hyperbolic case. The assumption on the partition is crucial: Generally, only the order \(O(h^k)\) is observed. The theoretical results are illustrated by computations for the Maxwell equations of electromagnetism.