In this paper, we consider an interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for the time-dependent Maxwell’s equations in cold plasma. In Huang and Li (J. Sci. Comput., 42 (2009), 321–340), for both semi and fully discrete DG schemes, we proved error estimates which are optimal in the energy norm, but sub-optimal in the L2-norm. Here by filling this gap, we show that these schemes are optimally convergent in the L2-norm on quasi-uniform tetrahedral meshes if the solution is sufficiently smooth.

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In this paper we propose a time-domain finite element method for modeling of electromagnetic cloaks. The permittivity and permeability of the cloak model are described by the Drude dispersion model. The model to be solved is quite challenging in that we have to solve a coupled problem with different partial differential equations given in different regions. Our method is based on a mixed finite element method using edge elements with different types of meshes in different regions. Numerical results demonstrate that our algorithm is quite effective for simulating cloaks in time-domain. To our knowledge, this is the first cloak simulation carried out by the time-domain finite element method.

In this article, we consider the time-dependent Maxwell’s equations modeling wave propagation in metamaterials. One-order higher global superclose results in the L2 norm are proved for several semidiscrete and fully discrete schemes developed for solving this model using nonuniform cubic and rectangular edge elements. Furthermore, L ∞ superconvergence at element centers is proved for the lowest order rectangular edge element. To our best knowledge, such pointwise superconvergence result and its proof are original, and we are unaware of any other publications on this issue.

In this paper we develop a leap-frog-type finite element method for modeling the electromagnetic wave propagation in metamaterials. The metamaterial model equations are represented by integrodifferential Maxwell’s equations, which are quite challenging to analyze and solve in that we have to solve a coupled problem with different partial differential equations given in different material regions. Our method is based on a mixed finite element method using edge elements, which can easily handle the tangential continuity of the electric field. Stability analysis and optimal error estimate are carried out for the proposed scheme. The scheme is implemented and confirmed to obey the proved optimal convergence rate by using a smooth analytical solution. Then the scheme is extended to model wave propagation in heterogeneous media composed of metamaterials and free space, and extensive numerical results (using a rectangular edge element, a triangular edge element, and mixed edge elements) demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for modeling the exotic backward wave propagation phenomenon in metamaterials. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper with an exhaustive simulation of backward wave propagation in metamaterials using time-domain finite element methods.