The parabolic p-Laplacian with fractional differentiability

Abstract

Abstract We study the parabolic $p$-Laplacian system in a bounded domain. We deduce optimal convergence rates for the space–time discretization based on an implicit Euler scheme in time. Our estimates are expressed in terms of Nikolskiǐ spaces and therefore cover situations when the (gradient of the) solution has only fractional derivatives in space and time. The main novelty is that, different to all previous results, we do not assume any coupling condition between the space and time resolutions $h$ and $\tau $. For this we show that the $L^2$-projection is compatible with the quasi-norm. The theoretical error analysis is complemented by numerical experiments.