A linearized Crank–Nicolson–Galerkin FEM for the time‐dependent Ginzburg–Landau equations under the temporal gauge

We propose a decoupled and linearized fully discrete finite element method (FEM) for the time‐dependent Ginzburg–Landau equations under the temporal gauge, where a Crank–Nicolson scheme is used for the time discretization. By carefully designing the time‐discretization scheme, we manage to prove the convergence rate , where τ is the time‐step size and r is the degree of the finite element space. Due to the degeneracy of the problem, the convergence rate in the spatial direction is one order lower than the optimal convergence rate of FEMs for parabolic equations. Numerical tests are provided to support our error analysis. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 30: 1279–1290, 2014