OPTIMAL A POSTERIORI ERROR ESTIMATES OF THE LOCAL DISCONTINUOUS GALERKIN METHOD FOR CONVECTION- DIFFUSION PROBLEMS IN ONE SPACE DIMENSION

In this paper, we derive optimal order a posteriori error estimates for the local dis- continuous Galerkin （LDC） method for linear convection-diffusion problems in one space dimension. One of the key ingredients in our analysis is the recent optimal superconver- gence result in [Y. Yang and C.-W. Shu, J. Comp. Math., 33 （2015）, pp. 323-340]. We first prove that the LDG solution and its spatial derivative, respectively, converge in the L2-norm to （p ＋ 1）-degree right and left Radau interpolating polynomials under mesh re- finement. The order of convergence is proved to be p ＋ 2, when piecewise polynomials of degree at most p are used. These results are used to show that the leading error terms on each element for the solution and its derivative are proportional to （p ＋ 1）-degree right and left Radau polynomials. We further prove that, for smooth solutions, the a posteriori LDG error estimates, which were constructed by the author in an earlier paper, converge, at a fixed time, to the true spatial errors in the L2-norm at （.9（hp＋2） rate. Finally, we prove that the global effectivity indices in the L2-norm converge to unity at （9（h） rate. These results improve upon our previously published work in which the order of convergence for the a posteriori error estimates and the global effectivity index are proved to be p＋3/2 and 1/2, respectively. Our proofs are valid for arbitrary regular meshes using PP polynomials with p ≥ 1. Several numerical experiments are performed to validate the theoretical results.