A Novel Error Analysis of Spectral Method for the Anomalous Subdiffusion Problems with Multi-term Time-fractional Derivative

Abstract

This paper aims to extend a space-time spectral method to address the multi-term time-fractional subdiffusion equations with Caputo derivative. In this method, the Jacobi polynomials are adopted as the basis functions for temporal discretization and the Lagrangian polynomials are used for spatial discretization. An efficient spectral approximation of the weak solution is established. The main work is the demonstration of the well-posedness for the weak problem and the derivation of a posteriori error estimates for the spectral Galerkin approximation. Extensive numerical experiments are presented to perform the validity of a posteriori error estimators, which support our theoretical results.