TY - JOUR T1 - Implicit-Explicit Scheme for the Allen-Cahn Equation Preserves the Maximum Principle AU - Tang , Tao AU - Yang , Jiang JO - Journal of Computational Mathematics VL - 5 SP - 451 EP - 461 PY - 2016 DA - 2016/10 SN - 34 DO - http://doi.org/10.4208/jcm.1603-m2014-0017 UR - https://global-sci.org/intro/article_detail/jcm/9806.html KW - Allen-Cahn Equations, Implicit-explicit scheme, Maximum principle, Nonlinear energy stability. AB -

It is known that the Allen-Chan equations satisfy the maximum principle. Is this true for numerical schemes? To the best of our knowledge, the state-of-art stability framework is the nonlinear energy stability which has been studied extensively for the phase field type equations. In this work, we will show that a stronger stability under the infinity norm can be established for the implicit-explicit discretization in time and central finite difference in space. In other words, this commonly used numerical method for the Allen-Cahn equation preserves the maximum principle.