EFFICIENT NUMERICAL SCHEME FOR THE ANISOTROPIC MODIFIED PHASE-FIELD CRYSTAL MODEL WITH A STRONG NONLINEAR VACANCY POTENTIAL*

In this paper, we consider numerical approximations for the anisotropic modified phasefield crystal model with a strong nonlinear vacancy potential, which describes microscopic phenomena involving atomic hopping and vacancy diffusion. The model is a nonlinear damped wave equation that includes an anisotropic Laplacian and a strong nonlinear vacancy term. To develop an easy to implement time marching scheme with unconditional energy stability, we combine the multiple scalar auxiliary variable (MSAV) approach with stabilization technique for achieving an efficient and linear numerical scheme, in which two new scalar auxiliary variables are introduced to reformulate the model and a linear stabilization term is added to enhance the stability and keep the required accuracy while using the large time steps. The scheme leads to decoupled linear equations with constant coefficients at each time step, and its unique solvability and unconditional energy stability are proved. Various numerical experiments are performed to show the accuracy, stability, and efficiency of the proposed scheme.