Analysis of a new finite difference/local discontinuous Galerkin method for the fractional Cattaneo equation

In this paper, we first present a new finite difference scheme to approximate the time fractional derivatives, which is defined in the sense of Caputo, and give a semidiscrete scheme in time with the truncation error O((Δt)^3?α ), where Δt is the time step size. Then a fully discrete scheme based on the semidiscrete scheme for the fractional Cattaneo equation in which the space direction is approximated by a local discontinuous Galerkin method is presented and analyzed. We prove that the method is unconditionally stable and convergent with order O(h ^k+1 + (Δt)^3?α ), where k is the degree of piecewise polynomial. Numerical examples are also given to confirm the theoretical analysis.