An Energy Conserving, Implicit and Higher Order in Time Discretization of Maxwell's Equations

Abstract: This is a sequel to our earlier work in which we described an implicit leapfrog scheme in conjunction with a higher order mixed finite element discretization of a system of Maxwell's equations. In our earlier work, we focussed on providing the error analysis for both the semidiscretization of the Maxwell's equations using an implicit leapfrog scheme that we invented as well as providing the error analysis for the full discretization using this time domain scheme in conjunction with higher order mixed finite elements from finite element exterior calculus. In this work, we record our initial results with extending our implicit leapfrog scheme from being a discretization that is second order accurate in time to an arbitrary (even) order accurate in time method. Towards this end, we provide here the complete error analysis for the semidiscretization in time and full discretization of the Maxwell's equations for the fourth order scheme. We leave the completion of our efforts in providing all the necessary proofs for the general scheme to an immediate future update of this work.