First and second order operator splitting methods for the phase field crystal equation

Abstract

In this paper, we present operator splitting methods for solving the phase field crystal equation which is a model for the microstructural evolution of two-phase systems on atomic length and diffusive time scales. A core idea of the methods is to decompose the original equation into linear and nonlinear subequations, in which the linear subequation has a closed-form solution in the Fourier space. We apply a nonlinear Newton-type iterative method to solve the nonlinear subequation at the implicit time level and thus a considerably large time step can be used. By combining these subequations, we achieve the first-and second-order accuracy in time. We present numerical experiments to show the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed methods. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.