From local equilibrium to numerical PDE: Metropolis crystal surface dynamics in the rough scaling limit

Abstract

We derive the PDE governing the hydrodynamic limit of a Metropolis rate crystal surface height process in the "rough scaling" regime introduced by Marzuola and Weare. The PDE takes the form of a continuity equation, and the expression for the current involves a numerically computed multiplicative correction term similar to a mobility. The correction accounts for the fact that, unusually, the local equilibrium distribution of the process is not a local Gibbs measure even though the global equilibrium distribution is Gibbs. We give definitive numerical evidence of this fact, originally suggested in Gao, et. al., Pure and Applied Analysis (2021). In that paper, an approximate PDE -- our PDE, but without the correction term -- was derived for the limit of the Metropolis rate process under the assumption of a local Gibbs distribution. Our main contribution is to present a numerical method to compute the corrected macroscopic current, which is given by a function of the third spatial derivative of the height profile. Our method exploits properties of the local equilibrium (LE) state of the third order finite difference process. We find that the LE state of this process is not only useful for deriving the PDE; it also enjoys nonstandard properties which are interesting in their own right. Namely, we demonstrate that the LE state is a "rough LE", a novel kind of LE state discovered in our recent work on an Arrhenius rate crystal surface process.