Degenerate nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard equations: well-posedness, regularity and local asymptotics (Q2179479)

The authors develop a well-posedness theory for nonlocal Cahn-Hilliard equations with a convection term and a singular kernel of the form \[ K_{\epsilon}(x,y)=\displaystyle\frac{\rho_{\varepsilon}(|x-y|)}{|x-y|^2}, \] for \(\epsilon>0\). Here \((\rho_{\epsilon})_{\epsilon}\) is a suitable sequence of mollifiers. Their results are based on a suitable approximation of the nonlinearity, a fixed point argument for the existence analysis for the approximating equations, some uniform estimates, and nontrivial compactness and monotonicity arguments. The authors prove the convergence of solutions for the nonlocal convective Cahn-Hilliard equation with singular kernel to solutions of the associated local one. The regularity analysis for the solutions of an evolution problem which provides a nonlocal variant of the Cahn-Hilliard PDE is finally presented.