Existence of travelling-wave solutions and local well-posedness of the Fowler equation (Q1045752)

The authors consider the motion of a dune. Denoting the dune amplitude by \(u=u(x,t)\), Fowler proposed an evolution equation \[ u_t +\bigg(u^2 -u_x \int_0^x \xi^{-1/3} u_x (x-\xi ,t)\,d\xi \bigg)_x=0. \] It contains a nonlinear term (the second term), dissipative one (the third one), and a nonlocal one (the fourth one). The authors give two results for this integro-differential equation. At first, they show that there exists a travelling-wave solution \(u(x,t)=\varphi (x-dt)\) of velocity \(d>0\), where \(\varphi\in C^1_b (\mathbb R)\). Here \(C^1_b (\mathbb R)\) denotes the set of \(C^1\) functions \(\varphi (x)\) such that \(\varphi (x)\), \(\varphi '(x)\) are bounded. Secondly, they show that there is a solution of the Cauchy problem for this equation, if the initial value \(u(x,0)\) belongs to a suitable subspace of \(C^1_b (\mathbb R)\). Neglecting the nonlinear term, they consider a linear approximation of the Fowler equation. They give a semigroup theory for this linearization, and reduce the nonlinear Cauchy problem to a fixed point theory for a certain Banach space.