Stability and discretization error analysis for the Cahn-Hilliard system via relative energy estimates

The stability of solutions to the Cahn-Hilliard equation with concentration dependent mobility with respect to perturbations is studied by means of relative energy estimates. As a by-product of this analysis, a weak-strong uniqueness principle is derived on the continuous level under realistic regularity assumptions on strong solutions. The stability estimates are further inherited almost verbatim by appropriate Galerkin approximations in space and time. This allows to derive sharp bounds for the discretization error in terms of certain projection errors and to establish order-optimal a priori error estimates for semi- and fully discrete approximation schemes. Numerical tests are presented for illustration of the theoretical results.