A positivity-preserving and energy stable scheme for a quantum diffusion equation

We propose a new fully-discretized finite difference scheme for a quantum diffusion equation, in both one and two dimensions. This is the first fully-discretized scheme with proven positivity-preserving and energy stable properties using only standard finite difference discretization. The difficulty in proving the positivity-preserving property lies in the lack of a maximum principle for fourth order partial differential equations. To overcome this difficulty, we reformulate the scheme as an optimization problem based on a variational structure and use the singular nature of the energy functional near the boundary values to exclude the possibility of non-positive solutions. The scheme is also shown to be mass conservative and consistent.