ADER discontinuous Galerkin schemes for general-relativistic ideal magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

We present a new class of high-order accurate numerical algorithms for solving the equations of general-relativistic ideal magnetohydrodynamics in curved space-times. In this paper, we assume the background space-time to be given and static, i.e. we make use of the Cowling approximation. The governing partial differential equations are solved via a new family of fully discrete and arbitrary high-order accurate path-conservative discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite-element methods combined with adaptive mesh refinement and time accurate local time-stepping. In order to deal with shock waves and other discontinuities, the high-order DG schemes are supplemented with a novel a posteriori subcell finite-volume limiter, which makes the newalgorithms as robust as classical second-order total-variation diminishing finitevolume methods at shocks and discontinuities, but also as accurate as unlimited high-order DG schemes in smooth regions of the flow. We show the advantages of this new approach by means of various classical two- and three-dimensional benchmark problems on fixed space- times. Finally, we present a performance and accuracy comparisons between Runge-Kutta DG schemes and ADER high-order finite-volume schemes, showing the higher efficiency of DG schemes.