A discontinuous Galerkin method for the wave equation

We present a new discontinuous Galerkin method for solving the second-order wave equation using the standard continuous finite element method in space and a discontinuous method in time directly applied to second-order ode systems. We prove several optimal a priori error estimates in space–time norms for this new method and show that it can be more efficient than existing methods. We also write the leading term of the local discretization error in terms of Lobatto polynomials in space and Jacobi polynomials in time which leads to superconvergence points on each space–time cell. We discuss how to apply our results to construct efficient and asymptotically exact a posteriori estimates for space–time discretization errors. Numerical results are in agreement with theory.