Efficient numerical methods for computing the stationary states of phase field crystal models
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Finding the stationary states of a free energy functional is an important problem in phase field crystal (PFC) models. Many efforts have been devoted for designing numerical schemes with energy dissipation and mass conservation properties. However, most existing approaches are time-consuming due to the requirement of small effective time steps. In this paper, we discretize the energy functional and propose efficient numerical algorithms for solving the constrained non-convex minimization problem. A class of first order approaches, which is the so-called adaptive accelerated Bregman proximal gradient (AA-BPG) methods, is proposed and the convergence property is established without the global Lipschitz constant requirements. Moreover, we design a hybrid approach that applies an inexact Newton method to further accelerate the local convergence. One key feature of our algorithm is that the energy dissipation and mass conservation properties hold during the iteration process. Extensive numerical experiments, including two three dimensional periodic crystals in Landau-Brazovskii (LB) model and a two dimensional quasicrystal in Lifshitz-Petrich (LP) model, demonstrate that our approaches have adaptive time steps which lead to a significant acceleration over many existing methods when computing complex structures.
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