Dispersion and dissipation error in high-order Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin discretisations of the Maxwell equations

Different time-stepping methods for a nodal high-order discontinuous Galerkin discretisation of the Maxwell equations are discussed. A comparison between the most popular choices of Runge-Kutta (RK) methods is made from the point of view of accuracy and computational work. By choosing the strong-stability-preserving Runge-Kutta (SSP-RK) time-integration method of order consistent with the polynomial order of the spatial discretisation, better accuracy can be attained compared with fixed-order schemes. Moreover, this comes without a significant increase in the computational work. A numerical Fourier analysis is performed for this Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) discretisation to gain insight into the dispersion and dissipation properties of the fully discrete scheme. The analysis is carried out on both the one-dimensional and the two-dimensional fully discrete schemes and, in the latter case, on uniform as well as on non-uniform meshes. It also provides practical information on the convergence of the dissipation and dispersion error up to polynomial order 10 for the one-dimensional fully discrete scheme.