A comparison principle for the porous medium equation and its consequences (Q529995)

Summary: We prove a comparison principle for the porous medium equation in more general open sets in \(\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\) than space-time cylinders. We apply this result in two related contexts: we establish a connection between a potential theoretic notion of the obstacle problem and a notion based on a variational inequality. We also prove the basic properties of the PME capacity, in particular that there exists a capacitary extremal which gives the capacity for compact sets.