Well-posedness for a molecular beam epitaxy model

Abstract

We study a general molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) equation modeling the epitaxial growth of thin films. We show that, in the deterministic case, the associated Cauchy problem admits a unique smooth solution for all time, given initial data in the space $X_0 = L^{2}(R^{d}) \cap \dot{W}^{1,4}(R^{d})$ with $d = 1, 2$. This improves a recent result by Ag\'elas, who established global existence in $H^{3}(R^{d})$. Moreover, we investigate the local existence and uniqueness of solutions in the space $X_0$ for the stochastic MBE equation, with an additive noise that is white in time and regular in the space variable.