Unconditional superconvergence analysis of a Crank-Nicolson Galerkin FEM for nonlinear Schrödinger equation (Q2412734)

Consider the following mixed problem for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation: \[ \begin{gathered} i u_t + \Delta u + f(|u|^2) u =0, \;\;(X,t) \in \Omega \times (0,T],\\ u=0, \;\;(X,T) \in \partial \Omega \times (0,T],\\ u(X,0)=u_0(X), \;\;X \in \Omega. \end{gathered} \] Here, \(X=(x,y)\), \(0<T< \infty\), \( \Omega \subset \mathbb R^2\) is a rectangle with the boundary \(\partial \Omega\), \(u_0(X)\) is a known complex-valued function, \(f(s)\) is a real-valued function which is twicely continuously differentiable with respect to \(s\). The nonlinear Schrödinger equation plays an important role in describing physical phenomena in such areas as optical pulses, plasma physics, water waves and so on. A linearized Crank-Nicolson-Galerkin finite element method with bilinear element for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation is studied. By splitting the error into two parts which are called the temporal and the spatial error, the unconditional superconvergence result is obtained. The regularity result for a time-discrete system is based on the estimate for the temporal error. The classical Ritz projection is applied to get the spacial error with order \(O(h^2)\) in the \(L^2\)-norm, which plays an important role in getting rid of the restriction for \(\tau\). The superconvergence estimates of order \(O(h^2 + \tau^2)\) in the \(H^1\)-norm are based on the relationship between the Ritz projection and the interpolated operator. Global superconvergence property is arrived by the interpolated postprocessing technique. Numerical examples are provided to confirm the theoretical analysis.