Long-time asymptotics for the porous medium equation: the spectrum of the linearized operator (Q2436997)

In the present paper the long-time asymptotics of nonnegative solutions to the porous medium equation \[ \partial_t\rho-\Delta(\rho^m)=0\quad\text{in } \mathbb R^n\leqno{(1)} \] are studied. The complete spectrum of the displacement Hessian operator \(\mathcal H\psi=-m\hat\rho^{m-2}_*\hat\nabla\cdot(\hat\rho_*\hat\nabla\psi)\), which is obtained from (1) by linearization around the Barenblatt profile \(\rho_*\) (stationary attractor), is computed. The main result is formulated in Theorem 1: The displacement Hessian operator \(\mathcal H:\mathcal D(\mathcal H)\to H^1_{\rho_*}\), where \(\mathcal D(\mathcal H)=\{\psi\in H_{\text{loc}}^3\cap H^1_{\rho_*}: \rho^{m-2}_*\nabla\cdot(\rho_*\nabla\psi)\in H^1_{\rho_*}, \rho_*\nabla\psi\cdot\nu=0\text{ on } \partial{\text{ supp}}(\rho_*)\}\) can be understood as a self-adjoint operator (Proposition 1), its spectrum is purely discrete (Proposition 2), its eigenvalues and eigenfunctions are computed in Proposition 3.