An Energy Stable Linear Diffusive Crank-Nicolson Scheme for the Cahn-Hilliard Gradient Flow

Abstract: We propose and analyze a linearly stabilized semi-implicit diffusive Crank--Nicolson scheme for the Cahn--Hilliard gradient flow. In this scheme, the nonlinear bulk force is treated explicitly with two second-order stabilization terms. This treatment leads to linear elliptic system with constant coefficients and provable discrete energy dissipation. Rigorous error analysis is carried out for the fully discrete scheme. When the time step-size and the space step-size are small enough, second order accuracy in time is obtained with a prefactor controlled by some lower degree polynomial of $1/\varepsilon$. {Here $\varepsilon$ is the thickness of the interface}. Numerical results together with an adaptive time stepping are presented to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed scheme.