Lizhen Chen

Lizhen Chen, Jia Zhao, Hong Wang

In this paper, we study the phase field models with fractional-order in time. The phase field models have been widely used to study coarsening dynamics of material systems with microstructures. It is known that phase field models are usually derived from energy variation so that they obey some energy dissipation laws intrinsically. Recently, many works have been published on investigating fractional-order phase field models, but little is known of the corresponding energy dissipation laws. We focus on the time-fractional phase field models and report that the effective free energy and roughness obey a universal power-law scaling dynamics during coarsening. Mainly, the effective free energy and roughness in the time-fractional phase field models scale by following a similar power law as the integer phase field models, where the power is linearly proportional to the fractional order. This universal scaling law is verified numerically against several phase field models, including the Cahn-Hilliard equations with different variable mobilities and molecular beam epitaxy models. This new finding sheds light on potential applications of time fractional phase field models in studying coarsening dynamics and crystal growths.

Lizhen Chen, Jia Zhao, Waixiang Cao et al.

In this paper, we propose a time-fractional molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) model with slope selection and its efficient, accurate, full discrete, linear numerical approximation. The numerical scheme utilizes the fast algorithm for the Caputo fractional derivative operator in time discretization and Fourier spectral method in spatial discretization. Refinement tests are conducted to verify the $2-α$ order of time convergence, with $α\in (0, 1]$ the fractional order of derivative. Several numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our newly proposed scheme. By exploring the fast algorithm calculating the Caputo fractional derivative, our numerical scheme makes it practice for long time simulation of MBE coarsening, which is essential for MBE model in practice. With the proposed fractional MBE model, we observe that the scaling law for the energy decays as $ O(t^{-\fracα{3}})$ and the roughness increases as $O(t^{\fracα{3}})$, during the coarsening dynamics with random initial condition. That is to say, the coarsening rate of MBE model could be manipulated by the fractional order $α$, and it is linearly proportional to $α$. This is the first time in literature to report/discover such scaling correlation. It provides a potential application field for fractional differential equations. Besides, the numerical approximation strategy proposed in this paper can be readily applied to study many classes of time-fractional and high dimensional phase field models.

Lizhen Chen, Zhiping Mao, Huiyuan Li

An efficient Jacobi-Galerkin spectral method for calculating eigenvalues of Riesz fractional partial differential equations with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary values is proposed in this paper. In order to retain the symmetry and positive definiteness of the discrete linear system, we introduce some properly defined Sobolev spaces and approximate the eigenvalue problem in a standard Galerkin weak formulation instead of the Petrov-Galerkin one as in literature. Poincaré and inverse inequalities are proved for the proposed Galerkin formulation which finally help us establishing a sharp estimate on the algebraic system's condition number. Rigorous error estimates of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors are then readily obtained by using Babuška and Osborn's approximation theory on self-adjoint and positive-definite eigenvalue problems. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency, and to validate the asymptotically exponential oder of convergence. Moreover, the Weyl-type asymptotic law $ λ_n=\mathcal{O}(n^{2α})$ for the $n$-th eigenvalue $λ_n$ of the Riesz fractional differential operator of order $2α$, and the condition number $N^{4α}$ of its algebraic system with respect to the polynomial degree $N$ are observed.