A singular parabolic equation: existence, stabilization (Q413458)

This paper is concerned with existence and stabilization of positive weak solutions for the parabolic problem \(u_t-\Delta_p u=u^{-\delta}+f(x,u)\) in \(Q_T=(0,T)\times \Omega\), \(u=0\) on \(\Sigma_T=(0,T)\times \partial \Omega\) and \(u=u_0(x)\) in \(\Omega\). Here \(\Omega\) is a smooth and bounded domain of \(\mathbb R^N\), \(1<p<\infty\), \(T,\delta>0\), \(u_0\in L^\infty(\Omega)\cap W_0^{1,p}(\Omega)\). The nonlinearity \(f\) is a Caratheodory function bounded from below, locally Lipschitz with respect to the second variable and asymptotically sub-homogeneous, i.e., \(0\leq \lim_{s\rightarrow \infty}f(x,s)/s^{p-1}<\lambda_1(\Omega)\), where \(\lambda_1(\Omega)\) denotes the first eigenvalue of the Laplace operator under homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. It is proved that for any \(0<\delta<2+(p-1)^{-1}\) the problem has a unique weak solution \(u\in L^\infty(Q_T)\cap L^\infty(0,T;W_0^{1,p}(\Omega))\) which further satisfies \(u\in C([0,T];W_0^{1,p}(\Omega))\). Furthermore, as the authors show, the bound \(\delta<2+(p-1)^{-1}\) is sharp. The existence part is achieved by means of a semidiscretization in time with an implicit Euler method. Under some additional assumptions on \(f\) it is shown that the unique solution \(u\) converges in \(L^\infty(\Omega)\) norm to the unique solution of the stationary problem as \(t\rightarrow \infty\). Next, if \(p=2\) more regularity and asymptotic properties of the unique solution are obtained by using interpolation spaces theory and semigroup theory.