Error estimates of a continuous Galerkin time stepping method for subdiffusion problem

Abstract

A continuous Galerkin time stepping method is introduced and analyzed for subdiffusion problem in an abstract setting. The approximate solution will be sought as a continuous piecewise linear function in time $t$ and the test space is based on the discontinuous piecewise constant functions. We prove that the proposed time stepping method has the convergence order $O(\tau^{1+ \alpha}), \, \alpha \in (0, 1)$ for general sectorial elliptic operators for nonsmooth data by using the Laplace transform method, where $\tau$ is the time step size. This convergence order is higher than the convergence orders of the popular convolution quadrature methods (e.g., Lubich's convolution methods) and L-type methods (e.g., L1 method), which have only $O(\tau)$ convergence for the nonsmooth data. Numerical examples are given to verify the robustness of the time discretization schemes with respect to data regularity.