Error analysis of Nitsche's and discontinuous Galerkin methods of a reduced Landau-de Gennes problem

Abstract: We study a system of semi-linear elliptic partial differential equations with a lower order cubic nonlinear term, and inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, relevant for two-dimensional bistable liquid crystal devices, within a reduced Landau-de Gennes framework. The main results are (i) a priori error estimates for the energy norm, within the Nitsche's and discontinuous Galerkin frameworks under milder regularity assumptions on the exact solution and (ii) a reliable and efficient {\it a posteriori} analysis for a sufficiently large penalization parameter and a sufficiently fine triangulation in both cases. Numerical examples that validate the theoretical results, are presented separately.