Well-posedness and long-time behavior of a bulk-surface Cahn--Hilliard model with non-degenerate mobility

TL;DR

This paper establishes well-posedness and analyzes the long-term dynamics of a bulk-surface Cahn--Hilliard model with non-degenerate mobility, including uniqueness, existence, regularity, and convergence to equilibrium in two dimensions.

Contribution

It introduces new well-posedness and regularity results for a bulk-surface elliptic system and extends the analysis of the Cahn--Hilliard model to cases with weaker mobility assumptions.

Findings

Unique weak solutions with continuous dependence for regular mobility.

Existence of solutions with uniform-in-time regularity and separation property.

Convergence of solutions to stationary states over time.

Abstract

We study a bulk-surface Cahn--Hilliard model with non-degenerate mobility and singular potentials in two dimensions. Following the ideas of the recent work by Conti, Galimberti, Gatti, and Giorgini [Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations, 64(3):Paper No. 87, 32, 2025] for the Cahn--Hilliard equation with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions, we show the uniqueness of weak solutions together with a continuous dependence estimate for sufficiently regular mobility functions. Next, under weaker assumptions on the mobility functions, we show the existence of a weak solution that exhibits the propagation of uniform-in-time regularity and satisfies the instantaneous separation property. Lastly, we consider the long-time behavior and prove that the unique weak solution converges to a solution of the stationary bulk-surface Cahn--Hilliard equation. Our approach for the uniqueness proof relies on a new well-posedness and regularity theory for a bulk-surface elliptic system with non-constant coefficients, which may be of independent interest.