Equilibria with many nuclei for the Cahn-Hilliard equation (Q1968700)

In this very substantial paper, the authors construct multi-spike stationary solutions for the Cahn-Hilliard equation \(u_t=\Delta (f(u)-\epsilon^2 \Delta u)\) in a bounded domain in \({\mathbb R}^3\) with Neumann boundary conditions, and prove results concerning the instability of such solutions and the location of the spikes (nuclei). The results hold for \(f\) being a cubic nonlinearity, mass sufficiently close to \(\pm 1\) and \(\epsilon\) sufficiently small. Roughly, the method used by the authors to construct a multi-spike solution with \(N\) spikes, is as follows: they construct a \(3N\)-parameter family of quasi-stationary solutions with \(N\) spikes, which are shown to lie in a quasi-invariant manifold that contains all the stationary solutions with \(N\) spikes. Finally, a theorem indicating which elements of the quasi-invariant manifold correspond to true stationary solutions, is proved. For other work on similar matters using Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction and variational methods, the reader should consult also the work of \textit{J. C. Wei} and \textit{M. Winter} [e.g., Proc. R. Soc. Edinb., Sect. A 131, 185-204 (2001; Zbl 1038.35021)].