The interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method for elastic wave propagation: grid dispersion

Recently, there has been an increased interest in applying the discontinuous Galerkin method (DGM) to wave propagation. In this work, we investigate the applicability of the interior penalty DGM to elastic wave propagation by analysing it's grid dispersion properties, with particular attention to the effect that different basis functions have on the numerical dispersion. We consider different types of basis functions that naturally yield a diagonal mass matrix. This is relevant to seismology because a diagonal mass matrix is tantamount to an explicit and efficient time marching scheme. We find that the Legendre basis functions that are traditionally used in the DGM introduce numerical dispersion and anisotropy. Furthermore, we find that using Lagrange basis functions along with the Gauss nodes has attractive advantages for numerical wave propagation.