Quasi-optimality of the Crouzeix-Raviart FEM for p-Laplace-type problems

Abstract

We verify quasi-optimality of the Crouzeix-Raviart FEM for nonlinear problems of $p$-Laplace type. More precisely, we show that the error of the Crouzeix-Raviart FEM with respect to a quasi-norm is bounded from above by a uniformly bounded constant times the best-approximation error plus a data oscillation term. As a byproduct, we verify a novel more localized a priori error estimate for the conforming lowest-order Lagrange FEM.