The porous medium equation with large initial data on negatively curved Riemannian manifolds (Q1746489)

The paper deals with existence and uniqueness of very weak solutions to the following Cauchy problems for the porous medium equation on Riemannian manifolds \[ \begin{cases} u_t=\Delta(u^m) & \text{in}\;M\times(0,T),\cr u=u_0 & \text{on}\;M\times\{0\}. \end{cases} \] Here \(M\) is an \(N\)-dimensional complete, simply connected Riemannian manifold with nonpositive sectional curvatures (that is, a Cartan-Hadamard manifold), satisfying suitable lower bounds on the Ricci curvature, \(\Delta\) is the Laplace-Beltrami operator on \(M\) and \(m>1.\) The initial data \(u_0\) can grow at infinity at a prescribed rate, depending on the curvature bounds, and then the interval of existence \([0,T)\) may depend on \(u_0.\) The authors show that the curvature conditions imposed are sharp for the uniqueness in the sense that if they are not satisfied then, in general, there can be infinitely many solutions of the Cauchy problem even for bounded data. Furthermore, under matching upper bounds on sectional curvatures, a precise estimate for the maximal existence time is given, and it is proved that in general solutions do not exist if the initial data grow at infinity too fast, showing this way optimality of the growth rate of the data imposed. The authors obtain also pointwise blow-up results for a particular class of manifolds complying with the required curvature bounds, and of initial data with have critical growth.