Accuracy of Wave Speeds Computed from the DPG and HDG Methods for Electromagnetic and Acoustic Waves

Abstract

We study two finite element methods for solving time-harmonic electromagnetic and acoustic problems: the discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) method and the hybrid discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method. The DPG method for the Helmholtz equation is studied using a test space normed by a modified graph norm. The modification scales one of the terms in the graph norm by an arbitrary positive scaling parameter. We find that, as the parameter approaches zero, better results are obtained, under some circumstances. A dispersion analysis on the multiple interacting stencils that form the DPG method shows that the discrete wavenumbers of the method are complex, explaining the numerically observed artificial dissipation in the computed wave approximations. Since the DPG method is a nonstandard least-squares Galerkin method, its performance is compared with a standard least-squares method having a similar stencil. We study the HDG method for complex wavenumber cases and show how the HDG stabilization parameter must be chosen in relation to the wavenumber. We show that the commonly chosen HDG stabilization parameter values can give rise to singular systems for some complex wavenumbers. However, this failure is remedied if the real part of the stabilization parameter has the opposite sign of the imaginary part of the wavenumber. For real wavenumbers, results from a dispersion analysis for the Helmholtz case are presented. An asymptotic expansion of the dispersion relation, as the number of mesh elements per wave increase, reveal values of the stabilization parameter that asymptotically minimize the HDG wavenumber errors. Finally, a dispersion analysis of the mixed hybrid Raviart-Thomas method shows that its wavenumber errors are an order smaller than those of the HDG method. We conclude by presenting some contributions to the development of software tools for using the DPG method and their application to a terahertz photonic structure. We attempt to simulate field enhancements recently observed in a novel arrangement of annular nanogaps.