Error estimates for the third order explicit Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method for a linear hyperbolic equation in one-dimension with discontinuous initial data (Q2454038)

Authors' abatract: We present an error estimate for the explicit Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin method to solve a linear hyperbolic equation in one dimension with discontinuous but piecewise smooth initial data. The discontinuous finite element space is made up of piecewise polynomials of arbitrary degree \(k\geq1\), and time is advanced by the third-order explicit total variation diminishing Runge-Kutta method under the standard Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy temporal-spatial condition. The \(L^2(\mathbb{R}\setminus {\mathcal R}_T )\)-norm error at the final time \(T\) is optimal in both space and time, where \({\mathcal R}_T\) is the pollution region due to the initial discontinuity with the width \({\mathcal O}(\sqrt{T\beta}h^{1/2}\log (1/h))\). Here \(h\) is the maximum cell length and \(\beta\) is the flowing speed. These results are independent of the time step and hold also for the semi-discrete discontinuous Galerkin method.