Vanishing curvature viscosity for front propagation (Q1975455)

The authors study the front propagation with constant speed and small curvature viscosity. This investigation is tightly connected with two problems of scalar conservation laws. One of which is on nonlinear viscosity method and the other is on the structure of solutions to conservation laws with \(L^1\) initial data. It is shown that the nonlinear viscosity method related to the viscosity approximation \[ u^\varepsilon_t+f(u^\varepsilon)_x= \varepsilon(a(u^\varepsilon)u^\varepsilon_x)_x \] approaching the piecewise smooth solution with finite number of shocks for convex conservation laws \[ u^\varepsilon_t+f(u^\varepsilon)_x=0 \] has the first-order rate of \(L^1\)-convergence when \(\varepsilon\to 0+\). The solutions of conservation laws with \(L^1\) initial data are shown to be bounded for \(t>0\) under appropriate restrictions on singular points of initial data. These results suggest that the front propagation with a small curvature viscosity will approach the front movement with constant speed, as the small parameter goes to zero, and after the front breaks down, the cusps will disappear promtly and corners will be formed.