A Discontinuous Galerkin Method for One-Dimensional Nonlocal Wave Problems

¹ Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA
² Department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research, Rice University, Houston, TX, 77005, USA
³ Ken Kennedy Institute, Rice University, Houston, TX, 77005, USA

^* Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 12 July 2025
Revised: 7 April 2026
Accepted: 27 April 2026

Abstract

This paper presents a fully discrete numerical scheme for one-dimensional nonlocal wave equations and provides a rigorous theoretical analysis. To facilitate the spatial discretization, we introduce an auxiliary variable analogous to the gradient field in local discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for classical partial differential equations (PDEs) and reformulate the equation into a system of equations. The proposed scheme then uses a DG method for spatial discretization and the Crank–Nicolson method for time integration. We prove optimal L² error convergence for both the solution and the auxiliary variable under a special class of radial kernels at the semi-discrete level. In addition, for general kernels, we demonstrate the asymptotic compatibility of the scheme, ensuring that it recovers the classical DG approximation of the local wave equation in the zero-horizon limit. Furthermore, we prove that the fully discrete scheme preserves the energy of the nonlocal wave equation. A series of numerical experiments is presented to validate the theoretical findings.