There has been a significant research interest in the dynamics
of the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth lately.
The MBE technique is among the most refined methods for the
growth of thin solid films and it is of great importance for applied
studies.
Numerical methods for solving the continuum model of the MBE require
very large time simulation, and therefore large time steps become
necessary. The main purpose of this talk
is to present and analyze
highly stable time discretizations which allow much larger time step
than that for a standard implicit-explicit approach.
To this end, an extra term, which is consistent with the
order of the time discretization,
is added to stabilize the numerical schemes. Then the stability
properties of the resulting schemes are established rigorously.
Numerical experiments are carried out to support the theoretical claims.
The proposed methods are also applied to simulate the MBE models
with large solution times. The power laws for the coarsening process
are obtained and are compared with previously published results.
The generalization of the proposed method to the Cahn-Hilliard equation
is also discussed.