Duality analysis of interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin methods under minimal regularity and application to the a priori and a posteriori error analysis of Helmholtz problems

Abstract

We consider interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of time-harmonic wave propagation problems modeled by the Helmholtz equation, and derive novel a priori and a posteriori estimates. Our analysis classically relies on duality arguments of Aubin–Nitsche type, and its originality is that it applies under minimal regularity assumptions. The estimates we obtain directly generalize known results for conforming discretizations, namely that the discrete solution is optimal in a suitable energy norm and that the error can be explicitly controlled by a posteriori estimators, provided the mesh is sufficiently fine.