Dominik Meidner

Niklas Behringer, Dominik Meidner, Boris Vexler

We consider a linear-quadratic elliptic optimal control problem with point evaluations of the state variable in the cost functional. The state variable is discretized by conforming linear finite elements. For control discretization, three different approaches are considered. The main goal of the paper is to significantly improve known a priori discretization error estimates for this problem. We prove optimal error estimates for cellwise constant control discretizations in two and three space dimensions. Further, in two space dimensions, optimal error estimates for variational discretization and for the post-processing approach are derived.

Dominik Meidner, Boris Vexler

We consider a semilinear parabolic equation with a large class of nonlinearities without any growth conditions. We discretize the problem with a discontinuous Galerkin scheme dG(0) in time (which is a variant of the implicit Euler scheme) and with conforming finite elements in space. The main contribution of this paper is the proof of the uniform boundedness of the discrete solution. This allows us to obtain optimal error estimates with respect to various norms.

Dominik Meidner, Johannes Pfefferer, Klemens Schürholz et al.

The purpose of this work is to introduce and analyze a numerical scheme to efficiently solve boundary value problems involving the spectral fractional Laplacian. The approach is based on a reformulation of the problem posed on a semi-infinite cylinder in one more spatial dimension. After a suitable truncation of this cylinder, the resulting problem is discretized with linear finite elements in the original domain and with $hp$-finite elements in the extended direction. The proposed approach yields a drastic reduction of the computational complexity in terms of degrees of freedom and even has slightly improved convergence properties compared to a discretization using linear finite elements for both the original domain and the extended direction. The performance of the method is illustrated by numerical experiments.