An optimal transportation metric for solutions of the Camassa-Holm equation (Q871868)

In this paper the authors construct a global, continuous flow of solutions to the Camassa-Holm equation on the entire space \(H^1(\mathbb R)\). Their solutions are conservative, in the sense that the total energy \(\int(u^2+u_{x}^2)\,dx\) remains a.e. constant in time. As starting point, they construct a set of ``multi-peakon solutions''. Then, they show that these solutions form a continuous semigroup, whose domain is dense in the space \(H^1(\mathbb R)\). Taking the continuous extension, they obtain a continuous semigroup of solutions of the main equation, defined on the entire space \(H^1\). The particular metric is the most novel feature of this paper. They construct a new distance \(J(u,v)\) between functions \(u,v\in H^1\). Thus the distance function \(J\) provides the ideal tool to measure continuous dependence on the initial data. Using this new distance functional, they construct arbitrary solutions as the uniform limit of multi-peakon solutions, and prove a general uniqueness result. In this paper, the authors focus on conservative solutions to the C-H equation in the spatially periodic case.