On Power Law Scaling Dynamics for Time-fractional Phase Field Models during Coarsening

Abstract: In this paper, we study the phase field models with fractional-order in time. The phase field models have been widely used to study coarsening dynamics of material systems with microstructures. It is known that phase field models are usually derived from energy variation so that they obey some energy dissipation laws intrinsically. Recently, many works have been published on investigating fractional-order phase field models, but little is known of the corresponding energy dissipation laws. We focus on the time-fractional phase field models and report that the effective free energy and roughness obey a universal power-law scaling dynamics during coarsening. Mainly, the effective free energy and roughness in the time-fractional phase field models scale by following a similar power law as the integer phase field models, where the power is linearly proportional to the fractional order. This universal scaling law is verified numerically against several phase field models, including the Cahn-Hilliard equations with different variable mobilities and molecular beam epitaxy models. This new finding sheds light on potential applications of time fractional phase field models in studying coarsening dynamics and crystal growths.