Ultraspherical Spectral Method for Block Copolymer Systems on Unit Disk

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel ultraspherical spectral numerical method for simulating diblock and triblock copolymer systems with long-range interactions on the disk domain, demonstrating stability and complex pattern formations.

Contribution

It introduces the first numerical approach for copolymer models with long-range interactions in disk domains using ultraspherical spectral discretization.

Findings

The method achieves second-order temporal convergence.

Numerical results reveal bubble assembly patterns in diblock copolymers.

Novel pattern formations are observed in triblock copolymer systems.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate ultraspherical spectral method for the Ohta-Kawasaki (OK) and Nakazawa-Ohta (NO) models in the disk domain, representing diblock and triblock copolymer systems, respectively. We employ ultraspherical spectral discretization for spatial variables in the disk domain and apply the second-order backward differentiation formula (BDF) method for temporal discretization. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to develop a numerical method for diblock and triblock copolymer systems with long-range interactions in disk domains. We show the energy stability of the numerical method in both semi-discrete and fully-discrete discretizations. In our numerical experiments, we verify the second-order temporal convergence rate and the energy stability of the proposed methods. Our numerical results show that the coarsening dynamics in diblock copolymers lead to bubble assemblies both inside and on the boundary of the disk. Additionally, in the triblock copolymer system, we observe several novel pattern formations, including single and double bubble assemblies in the unit disk. These findings are detailed through extensive numerical experiments.