Mortar DG method with staggered hybridization for rayleigh waves simulation

The simulation of Rayleigh waves is important in a variety of geophysical applications. The computational challenge is the fact that very fine mesh is necessary as the waves are concentrated at the free surface and decay exponentially away from the free surface. To overcome this challenge and to develop a robust high order scheme for the simulation of Rayleigh waves, we develop a mortar discontinuous Galerkin method with staggered hybridization. The use of the mortar technique allows one to use fine mesh in only a local region near the free surface, and use coarse mesh in most of the domain. This approach reduces the computational cost significantly. The staggered hybridization allows the preservation of the strong symmetry of the stress tensor without complicated construction of basis functions. In particular, the basis functions are piecewise polynomial without any continuity requirement, and the coupling of the basis functions is performed by using carefully chosen hybridized variables. The resulting scheme is explicit in time, and only local saddle point system are solved for each time step. We will present several benchmark problems to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.