  The paper is devoted to a modification of the classical Cahn-Hilliard
equation proposed by some physicists. This modification is obtained by adding
the second time derivative of the order parameter multiplied by an inertial
coefficient which is usually small in comparison to the other physical
constants. The main feature of this equation is the fact that even a globally
bounded nonlinearity is "supercritical" in the case of two and three space
dimensions. Thus the standard methods used for studying semilinear hyperbolic
equations are not very effective in the present case. Nevertheless, we have
recently proven the global existence and dissipativity of strong solutions in
the 2D case (with a cubic controlled growth nonlinearity) and for the 3D case
with small inertial coefficient and arbitrary growth rate of the nonlinearity.
The present contribution studies the long-time behavior of rather weak (energy)
solutions of that equation and it is a natural complement of the results of our
previous papers. Namely, we prove here that the attractors for energy and
strong solutions coincide for both the cases mentioned above. Thus, the energy
solutions are asymptotically smooth. In addition, we show that the non-smooth
part of any energy solution decays exponentially in time and deduce that the
(smooth) exponential attractor for the strong solutions constructed previously
is simultaneously the exponential attractor for the energy solutions as well.
