Analysis of a perturbed Cahn-Hilliard model for Langmuir-Blodgett films (Q2330919)

The authors consider the evolution 1D initial/boundary value problem \( \overset{.}{u}=(-u^{\prime \prime }+\partial _{s}W(x,u))^{\prime \prime }-\beta u^{\prime }\), posed in \((0,L)\times (0,T)\), with the boundary conditions \(u(0,t)=0\), \(u^{\prime }(L,t)=0\), \((-u^{\prime \prime }+\partial _{s}W(x,u))\mid _{x=0}=0\), \((-u^{\prime \prime }+\partial _{s}W(x,u))^{\prime }\mid _{x=L}=0\), and the initial condition \(u(x,0)=u_{0}\) . Here \(W\in C^{3}([0,L]\times \mathbb{R};\mathbb{R})\) and satisfies \( W(x,s)\geq K_{0}\) and \(\partial _{s}W(x,s)s\geq W(x,s)-K_{1}\), for positive constants \(K_{0},K_{1}\). The authors first define the notion of weak solution to this problem as a function \(u\in H^{1}(0,T;V)\cap L^{2}(0,T;H^{3}(0,L))\) with \(V=\{u\in H^{1}(0,L):u(0)=0\}\) such that \(\mu =-u^{\prime \prime }+\partial _{s}W(x,u)\in L^{2}(0,T;V)\), for every \(\psi \in V\) and \(t\in (0,T)\) \(\left\langle \overset{.}{u}(t),\psi \right\rangle _{V^{\prime },V}=-\left( u(t),\psi \right) _{V}-\beta \int_{0}^{L}u^{\prime }(x,t)\psi (x)dx\) and \(u\) satisfies the two first boundary conditions. The first main result of the paper proves the existence of a unique weak solution to this problem which further satisfies the energy equality \(\frac{d }{dt}\mathcal{E}(u(t))+\left\Vert \mu (t)\right\Vert _{V}^{2}=-\beta \int_{0}^{L}u^{\prime }(x,t)\mu (x,t)dx\) with \(\mathcal{E}(v)=\frac{1}{2} \int_{0}^{L}\left\Vert v^{\prime }(x)\right\Vert _{V}^{2}+\int_{0}^{L}W(x,v(x))dx\). This weak solution satisfies a continuous dependence property with respect to the initial data: \(\left\Vert u(t)- \overline{u}(t)\right\Vert _{V}\leq C_{M}\left\Vert u_{0}-\overline{u} _{0}\right\Vert _{V}\). For the proof of the existence result, the authors introduce the auxiliary problem \(\overset{.}{u}=(-u^{\prime \prime }+\partial _{s}W(x,u))^{\prime \prime }-\beta q^{\prime }\) for which they build a time discrete solution through a minimization process (minimizing movement). Passing to the limit when the time step goes to 0, they obtain a so-called variational solution and they derive the equation satisfied by this variational solution. The end of the proof essentially relies on the application of a fixed point argument. The second main result of the paper proves that for \(\beta < L^{-3}\) the weak solution builds a semigroup which has a global attractor. The authors here prove that this semigroup is bounded, point dissipative and compact. The authors conclude their paper proving that for \(\beta \) small enough this weak solution is close to that obtained for \(\beta =0\), which is the solution of a purely diffusive Cahn-Hilliard equation, that is: \(\left\Vert u_{\beta }(t)-\overline{u} (t)\right\Vert _{V}\leq C\beta \).