Energy dissipation and maximum bound principle preserving scheme for solving a nonlocal ternary Allen-Cahn model

We present a new energy dissipation and maximum bound principle preserving scheme for solving a nonlocal ternary Allen-Cahn (NtAC) model, where the standard Laplace operator is deliberately replaced with a spatial convolution term that aims at describing long-range interactions among particles and the structure-preserving scheme is obtained based on the operator splitting method. The discrete maximum bound principle and global convergence of the new scheme are analyzed rigorously. Moreover, the scheme is strictly dissipative for a modified energy, which coincides with the original energy up to O(tau), where tau is the time step. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to show that the operator splitting method can guarantee the maximum bound principle for a ternary Allen-Cahn model. Various 2D/3D numerical experiments including theNtACmodel with mass conservation are tested to verify the bound-preserving and energy-stable properties of the resulted scheme.