We develop a robust solver for a second order mixed finite element splitting
scheme for the Cahn-Hilliard equation. This work is an extension of our
previous work in which we developed a robust solver for a first order mixed
finite element splitting scheme for the Cahn-Hilliard equaion. The key
ingredient of the solver is a preconditioned minimal residual algorithm (with a
multigrid preconditioner) whose performance is independent of the spacial mesh
size and the time step size for a given interfacial width parameter. The
dependence on the interfacial width parameter is also mild.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1709.0400
