A Second-Order, Linear, L^∞-Convergent, and Energy Stable Scheme for the Phase Field Crystal Equation*

In this paper, we present a second-order accurate and linear numerical scheme for the phase field crystal equation and prove its convergence in the discrete L^\infty sense. The key ingredient of the error analysis is to justify the boundedness of the numerical solution, so that the nonlinear term, treated explicitly in the scheme, can be bounded appropriately. Benefiting from the existence of the sixth-order dissipation term in the model, we first estimate the discrete H² norm of the numerical error. The error estimate in the supremum norm is then obtained by the Sobolev embedding, so that the uniform bound of the numerical solution is available. We also show the mass conservation and the energy stability in the discrete setting. The proposed scheme is linear with constant coefficients so that it can be solved efficiently via some fast algorithms. Numerical experiments are conducted to verify the theoretical results, and long-time simulations in two- and three-dimensional spaces demonstrate the satisfactory and high effectiveness of the proposed numerical scheme.