Asymptotically compatible energy and dissipation law of the nonuniform L2-$1_σ$ scheme for time fractional Allen-Cahn model

Abstract: We build an asymptotically compatible energy of the variable-step L2-$1_{\sigma}$ scheme for the time-fractional Allen-Cahn model with the Caputo's fractional derivative of order $\alpha\in(0,1)$, under a weak step-ratio constraint $\tau_k/\tau_{k-1}\geq r_{\star}(\alpha)$ for $k\ge2$, where $\tau_k$ is the $k$-th time-step size and $r_{\star}(\alpha)\in(0.3865,0.4037)$ for $\alpha\in(0,1)$. It provides a positive answer to the open problem in [J. Comput. Phys., 414:109473], and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first second-order nonuniform time-stepping scheme to preserve both the maximum bound principle and the energy dissipation law of time-fractional Allen-Cahn model. The compatible discrete energy is constructed via a novel discrete gradient structure of the second-order L2-$1_{\sigma}$ formula by a local-nonlocal splitting technique. It splits the discrete fractional derivative into two parts: one is a local term analogue to the trapezoid rule of the first derivative and the other is a nonlocal summation analogue to the L1 formula of Caputo derivative. Numerical examples with an adaptive time-stepping strategy are provided to show the effectiveness of our scheme and the asymptotic properties of the associated modified energy.