Well-Posedness and Global Attractors for Viscous Fractional Cahn–Hilliard Equations with Memory

Abstract

We examine a viscous Cahn–Hilliard phase-separation model with memory and where the chemical potential possesses a nonlocal fractional Laplacian operator. The existence of global weak solutions is proven using a Galerkin approximation scheme. A continuous dependence estimate provides uniqueness of the weak solutions and also serves to define a precompact pseudometric. This, in addition to the existence of a bounded absorbing set, shows that the associated semigroup of solution operators admits a compact connected global attractor in the weak energy phase space. The minimal assumptions on the nonlinear potential allow for arbitrary polynomial growth.