The Hardy inequality and the heat flow in curved wedges (Q283249)

The author shows that the polynomial decay rate of the heat semigroup of the Dirichlet Laplacian in curved planar wedges that are obtained as a compactly supported perturbation of straight wedges equals the sum of the usual dimensional decay rate and a multiple of the reciprocal value of the opening angle. To prove the result the method of self-similar variables for the associated heat equation is developed and it is studied the asymptotic behaviour of the transformed non-autonomous parabolic problem for large times. It is established an improved Hardy inequality for the Dirichlet Laplacian in non-trivially curved wedges and stated a conjecture about an improved decay rate in the case.