Due to the length this work is published in two parts. The second part will appear in Vol 23: 1 of this journal.

In this paper, we develop an energy stable fully discrete discontinuous Galekin (DG) finite element method for the thin film epitaxy problem. Based on the method of lines, we construct and prove the energy stability of the spatial semi-discrete DG scheme firstly. To avoid the strict time step restriction of the explicit time integration method, the first order convex splitting method is used to get an unconditionally stable fully discrete DG method, which is a linearly implicit scheme for this nonlinear problem. The energy stability of the fully discrete convex splitting DG scheme is also proved. To improve the temporal accuracy, spectral deferred correction (SDC) method is adapted to achieve the high order accuracy in both time and space. Combining with the convex splitting method, the SDC method can be linearly solvable, high order accurate and stable in our numerical tests. These advantages ensure that the resulting fully discrete DG scheme is efficient to perform the long time simulation of the thin film epitaxy model. Numerical experiments of the accuracy and long time simulation show the capability and efficiency of the method.

The Boltzmann equation which describes the time evolution of a large number of particles through the binary collision in statistics physics has close relation to the systems of fluid dynamics, that is, Euler equations and NavierStokes equations. As for a basic wave pattern to Euler equations, we consider the nonlinear stability of contact discontinuities to the Boltzmann equation. Even though the stability of the other two nonlinear waves, i.e., shocks and rarefaction waves has been extensively studied, there are few stability results on the contact discontinuity because unlike shock waves and rarefaction waves, its derivative has no definite sign, and decays slower than a rarefaction wave. Moreover, it behaves like a linear wave in a nonlinear setting so that its coupling with other nonlinear waves reveals a complicated interaction mechanism. Based on the new definition of contact waves to the Boltzmann equation

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