Spatial and Modal Superconvergence of the Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Linear Equations

We apply the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method with a degree p polynomial basis to the linear advection equation and derive a PDE which the numerical solution solves exactly. We use a Fourier approach to derive polynomial solutions to this PDE and show that the polynomials are closely related to the (frac{p}{p+1}) Padé approximant of the exponential function. We show that for a uniform mesh of N elements there exist ((p+1)N) independent polynomial solutions, N of which can be viewed as physical and pN as non-physical. We show that the accumulation error of the physical mode is of order (2p+1). In contrast, the non-physical modes are damped out exponentially quickly. We use these results to present a simple proof of the superconvergence of the DG method on uniform grids as well as show a connection between spatial superconvergence and the superaccuracies in dissipation and dispersion errors of the scheme. Finally, we show that for a class of initial projections on a uniform mesh, the superconvergent points of the numerical error tend exponentially quickly towards the downwind based Radau points.