On the nature of ill-posedness of the forward-backward heat equation (Q1049589)

The authors study a Cauchy problem for a forward-backward heat equation with periodic initial data. They start from a lubrication problem for a thin viscous fluid on the inner surface of a rotating cylinder. This problem has been described as \(h_{t}+Lh=0\) in \((-\pi ,\pi )\times (0,T)\) where \(L\) is the operator \(Lh=\varepsilon \partial _{\theta }(\sin (\theta )h_{\theta })+h_{\theta }\). Periodicity conditions \(h(.,-\pi )=h(.,\pi )\) are imposed and the solution \(h\) starts from some \(h_{0}\) at \(t=0\). Some spectral properties of this operator have been described by several authors. The main goal of the paper is to prove that the complete set of eigenvectors of \(L\) does not form a Riesz basis in \(L^{2}(-\pi ,\pi )\) for \(0<\varepsilon <2\). The authors start studying the operator \(l(h)=\varepsilon d(\sin (\theta )dh/d\theta )/d\theta +dh/d\theta \). They give the integral expression of the solution \(h\) of \(l(h)=f\), from which they deduce some properties of this solution. They then prove that under some hypotheses the original problem has no generalized solution in the Sobolev space \(W_{2p}^{1,0}(Q)\), where \( Q=(-\pi ,\pi )\times (0,T)\). They then prove some completeness property of the operator \(L\). The main result of the paper is finally proved by contradiction using a property of the pure imaginary eigenvalues of some restriction of the operator \(L\).