The BDF3/EP3 scheme for MBE with no slope selection is stable (Q2233971)

The paper is concerned with the numerical approximation of a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) model, which models the epitaxial growth of thin films (relevant, e.g., to model the manufacture of semiconductor devices). The authors consider a MBE model with no slope selection in two dimensions. The quantity of interest is a scalar function \(h = h(t,x)\), which represents a scaled height function of the thin film in a co-moving frame. The problem is posed on the two-dimensional periodic torus and consists of an \(L^2\)-gradient flow for the energy functional \[ \mathcal{E}(h) = \int_{\Omega} \left( -\frac{1}{2} \log(1 + \vert \nabla h \vert^2) + \frac{1}{2} \eta^2 \vert \Delta h \vert^2 \right) \mathrm{d}x, \] where \(\eta^2>0\) is the diffusion coefficient. The resulting equation reads as \[ \partial_t h = - \eta^2 \Delta^2 h - \nabla\cdot \left( \frac{\nabla h}{ 1 + \vert \nabla h \vert^2} \right). \] The focus of the paper is on the time approximation of the problem (semi-discrete approximation). The authors propose a third-order backward differentiation formula with third-order extrapolation (BDF3/EP3). The method does not require any stabilization term (which is a favorable property, as a proper selection of the stabilization parameters is always a delicate task). The main contributions of the paper, well summarized in the introduction, are the following: (1) explicit and mild time step constraints under which a modified energy dissipation law holds are quantified, (2) unconditional uniform energy boundedness is established, (3) a novel theoretical framework for the error analysis of BDF3-type methods is proposed. Numerical experiments underpinning the theoretical findings concludes the work.