Polynomial preserving recoveries of edge element method on Cartesian grids for the time-harmonic Maxwell equations with large wave number

Abstract

This paper considers the lowest-order first type Nédélec edge element method (EEM) on Cartesian grids for the three-dimensional time-harmonic Maxwell equations with a large wave number. New polynomial preserving recovery (PPR) operators are proposed for the curl of the edge element solution and for the solution itself, respectively. Under the condition that ${\kappa }^3{h}^2{C}_{\mathrm{sol}}$ is sufficiently small, second-order superconvergence estimates are proved for both the recovered curl and the recovered solution, where $\kappa$ is the wave number, $h$ is the mesh size, and $C_{\mathrm{sol}}$ is a stability constant associated with the Maxwell solution operator. In particular, the analysis shows that the proposed PPR procedures cannot mitigate the well-known pollution effect inherent to the EEM. To reduce the pollution error, we further propose a new continuous interior penalty edge element method (CIP-EEM) that incorporates an additional normal-jump penalty term. It is shown that by appropriately choosing the penalty parameters, the new CIP-EEM can improve the phase error by two orders in $\kappa h$. Numerical experiments are presented to confirm the theoretical superconvergence results and to demonstrate that the CIP-EEM can effectively reduce the pollution error in the high-frequency regime.