An a priori error analysis for the coupling of local discontinuous Galerkin and boundary element methods

In this paper we analyze the coupling of local discontinuous Galerkin (LDG) and boundary element methods as applied to linear exterior boundary value problems in the plane. As a model problem we consider a Poisson equation in an annular polygonal domain coupled with a Laplace equation in the surrounding unbounded exterior region. The technique resembles the usual coupling of finite elements and boundary elements, but the corresponding analysis becomes quite different. In particular, in order to deal with the weak continuity of the traces at the interface boundary, we need to define a mortar-type auxiliary unknown representing an interior approximation of the normal derivative. We prove the stability of the resulting discrete scheme with respect to a mesh-dependent norm and derive a Strang-type estimate for the associated error. Finally, we apply local and global approximation properties of the subspaces involved to obtain the a priori error estimate in the energy norm.