Journal of Hyperbolic Differential Equations

We obtain new fine properties of entropy solutions to scalar nonlinear conservation laws. For this purpose, we study the "fractional BV spaces" denoted by BV^s(ℝ) (for 0 < s ≤ 1), which were introduced by Love and Young in 1937 and closely related to the critical Sobolev space W^s,1/s(ℝ). We investigate these spaces in connection with one-dimensional scalar conservation laws. The BV^s spaces allow one to work with less regular functions than BV functions and appear to be more natural in this context. We obtain a stability result for entropy solutions with BV^s initial data. Furthermore, for the first time, we get the maximal W^s,p smoothing effect conjectured by Lions, Perthame and Tadmor for all nonlinear (possibly degenerate) convex fluxes.

This paper is devoted to the Euler–Poisson equations for fluids with non-zero heat conduction, arising in semiconductor science. Due to the thermal effect of the temperature equation, the local well-posedness theory by Xu and Kawashima (2014) for generally symmetric hyperbolic systems in spatially critical Besov spaces does not directly apply. To deal with this difficulty, we develop a generalized version of the Moser-type inequality by using Bony's decomposition. With a standard iteration argument, we then establish the local well-posedness of classical solutions to the Cauchy problem for intial data in spatially Besov spaces.

The well-posedness theory for hyperbolic systems of first-order quasilinear PDE's with ODE's boundary conditions (on a bounded interval) is discussed. Such systems occur in multi-scale blood flow models, as well as valveless pumping and fluid mechanics. The theory is presented in the setting of Sobolev spaces H^m (m ≥ 3 being an integer), which is an appropriate set-up when it comes to proving existence of smooth solutions using energy estimates. A blow-up criterion is also derived, stating that if the maximal time of existence is finite, then the state leaves every compact subset of the hyperbolicity region, or its first-order derivatives blow-up. Finally, we discuss physical examples which fit in the general framework presented.

In this companion paper to our study of amplification of wavetrains J.-F. Coulombel, O. Guès and M. Williams, Semilinear geometric optics with boundary amplification, Anal. PDE7(3) (2014) 551–625, we study weakly stable semilinear hyperbolic boundary value problems with pulse data. Here weak stability means that exponentially growing modes are absent, but the so-called uniform Lopatinskii condition fails at some boundary frequency in the hyperbolic region. As a consequence of this degeneracy there is again an amplification phenomenon: outgoing pulses of amplitude O(ε²) and wavelength ε give rise to reflected pulses of amplitude O(ε), so the overall solution has amplitude O(ε). Moreover, the reflecting pulses emanate from a radiating pulse that propagates in the boundary along a characteristic of the Lopatinskii determinant. In the case of N × N systems considered here, a single outgoing pulse produces on reflection a family of incoming pulses traveling at different group velocities. Unlike wavetrains, pulses do not interact to produce resonances that affect the leading order profiles. However, pulse interactions do affect lower-order profiles and so these interactions have to be estimated carefully in the error analysis. Whereas the error analysis in the wavetrain case dealt with small divisor problems by approximating periodic profiles by trigonometric polynomials (which amounts to using a high frequency cutoff), in the pulse case we approximate decaying profiles with nonzero moments by profiles with zero moments (a low frequency cutoff). Unlike the wavetrain case, we are now able to obtain a rate of convergence in the limit describing convergence of approximate to exact solutions.

We study the diffusion phenomenon associated with the linear wave equation with space-dependent damping, and give a proof that the asymptotic profile of solutions is represented by solutions to the associated heat equation, in the L² sense.

In this paper, we consider various tensorial estimates in geometric Besov-type norms on a one-parameter foliation of surfaces with evolving geometries. Moreover, we wish to accomplish this with only very weak control on these geometries. Several of these estimates were proved in [S. Klainerman and I. Rodnianski, Causal geometry of Einstein-vacuum spacetimes with finite curvature flux, Invent. Math. 159 (2005) 437–529; S. Klainerman and I. Rodnianski, Sharp trace theorems for null hypersurfaces on Einstein metrics with finite curvature flux, Geom. Funct. Anal. 16(3) (2006) 164–229], but in very specific settings. A primary objective of this paper is to significantly simplify and make more robust the proofs of the estimates. Another goal is to generalize these estimates to more abstract settings. In [S. Alexakis and A. Shao, On the geometry of null cones to infinity under curvature flux bounds, Class. Quantum Grav. 31 (2014) 195012], we will apply these estimates in order to consider a variant of the problem in [S. Klainerman and I. Rodnianski, Causal geometry of Einstein-vacuum spacetimes with finite curvature flux, Invent. Math. 159 (2005) 437–529], that of a truncated null cone in an Einstein-vacuum spacetime extending to infinity. This analysis will then be used in [S. Alexakis and A. Shao, Bounds on the Bondi energy by a flux of curvature, to appear in J. Eur. Math. Soc.] to study and to control the Bondi mass and the angular momentum under minimal conditions.