Quasinorms in semilinear elliptic problems

Abstract: In this note we examine the a priori and a posteriori analysis of discontinuous Galerkin finite element discretisations of semilinear elliptic PDEs with polynomial nonlinearity. We show that optimal a priori error bounds in the energy norm are only possible for low order elements using classical a priori error analysis techniques. We make use of appropriate quasinorms that results in optimal energy norm error control. We show that, contrary to the a priori case, a standard a posteriori analysis yields optimal upper bounds and does not require the introduction of quasinorms. We also summarise extensive numerical experiments verifying the analysis presented and examining the appearance of layers in the solution.