Sharp decay estimates and vanishing viscosity for diffusive Hamilton-Jacobi equations (Q1028504)

The purpose of this paper is to derive temporal decay estimates for the gradient and the time derivative of viscosity solutions to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation \[ \begin{cases} \partial_tv+H(|\nabla_xv|)=0,\;(x,t)\in\mathbb{R}^N \times(0,\infty)\\ v(x,0) =\varphi(x),\quad x\in\mathbb{R}^N\end{cases} \] and its diffusive counterpart \[ \begin{cases} \partial_tv_\varepsilon-\varepsilon \Delta v_\varepsilon+H(|\nabla v_\varepsilon |)=0,\;(x,t)\in\mathbb{R}^N \times(0,\infty),\varepsilon>0\\ v_\varepsilon(x,0)= \varphi(x),\quad x \in\mathbb{R}^N\end{cases} \] under suitable assumptions on the Hamiltonian function \(H\) and for initial data \(\varphi\) which are continuous but not necessarily uniformly continuous (and in some cases not even bounded). The main feature of this analysis is that the authors carefully trace the dependence on the ``viscosity'' parameter \(\varepsilon\) in the estimates of the space-time gradients of \(v_\varepsilon\). They obtain estimates which do not deteriorate as \(\varepsilon\to 0\) and thus reflect the regularizing effect of the nonlinear term \(H(|\nabla v_\varepsilon|)\). As a by-product, they obtain convergence of the sequence \((v_\varepsilon)\) as \(\varepsilon\to 0\) to a viscosity solution.