A local discontinuous Galerkin method for nonlinear parabolic SPDEs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) method for nonlinear and possibly degenerate parabolic stochastic partial differential equations, which is a high-order numerical scheme. It extends the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for purely hyperbolic equations to parabolic equations and shares with the DG method its advantage and flexibility. We prove the L2-stability of the numerical scheme for fully nonlinear equations. Optimal error estimates (O(h(k+1))) for smooth solutions of semi-linear stochastic equations is shown if polynomials of degree k are used. We use an explicit derivative-free order 1.5 time discretization scheme to solve the matrix-valued stochastic ordinary differential equations derived from the spatial discretization. Numerical examples are given to display the performance of the LDG method.