Benchmark computations of the phase field crystal and functionalized Cahn-Hilliard equations via fully implicit, Nesterov accelerated schemes

TL;DR

This paper presents a fast, fully implicit solver for the phase field crystal and functionalized Cahn-Hilliard equations using Nesterov accelerated gradient descent, demonstrating efficiency improvements over existing methods through comprehensive benchmarking.

Contribution

The authors introduce a preconditioned Nesterov accelerated gradient descent method for efficiently solving PFC and FCH equations with fully implicit schemes, including practical strategies for parameter tuning.

Findings

Fully implicit schemes outperform semi-implicit ones in FCH experiments.

The PAGD solver significantly speeds up computations compared to PGD.

Practical preconditioning strategies improve solver performance.

Abstract

We introduce a fast solver for the phase field crystal (PFC) and functionalized Cahn-Hilliard (FCH) equations with periodic boundary conditions on a rectangular domain that features the preconditioned Nesterov accelerated gradient descent (PAGD) method. We discretize these problems with a Fourier collocation method in space, and employ various second-order schemes in time. We observe a significant speedup with this solver when compared to the preconditioned gradient descent (PGD) method. With the PAGD solver, fully implicit, second-order-in-time schemes are not only feasible to solve the PFC and FCH equations, but also do so more efficiently than some semi-implicit schemes in some cases where accuracy issues are taken into account. Benchmark computations of five different schemes for the PFC and FCH equations are conducted and the results indicate that, for the FCH experiments, the fully implicit schemes (midpoint rule and BDF2 equipped with the PAGD as a nonlinear time marching solver) perform better than their IMEX versions in terms of computational cost needed to achieve a certain precision. For the PFC, the results are not as conclusive as in the FCH experiments, which, we believe, is due to the fact that the nonlinearity in the PFC is milder nature compared to the FCH equation. We also discuss some practical matters in applying the PAGD. We introduce an averaged Newton preconditioner and a sweeping-friction strategy as heuristic ways to choose good preconditioner parameters. The sweeping-friction strategy exhibits almost as good a performance as the case of the best manually tuned parameters.