No label defined (Q4525528)

The authors prove explicit decay rates for solutions of the following strongly coupled system of degenerate parabolic equations \[ \partial_t b(u)-\text{div } a(u,\nabla u) = f(u) \quad \text{in }\Omega\times(0,\infty),\qquad b(u(\cdot,0)) = b(u_0) \quad \text{in }\Omega, \] either in the whole space \(\Omega={\mathbb R}^d\) or in a bounded domain \(\Omega \subset{\mathbb R}^d\) (\(d\geq 1\)) with Lipschitz boundary. In the second case the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition \[ u = 0 \quad \text{on } \Omega\times(0,\infty) \] is imposed. Here \(u:\Omega\times(0,\infty)\to{\mathbb R}^n\) is a vector-valued function, \(a(\cdot,\cdot)\) is a matrix-valued function with \(n\) rows and \(d\) columns and \(\nabla u\) stands for the Jacobian of the \(n\)-dimensional vector field \(u\), i.e. \((\nabla u)_{ij}={{\partial u_i}\over{\partial x_j}}\). The systems under consideration include the scalar porous medium, fast diffusion and \(p\)-Laplace equation and strongly coupled systems of these equations. For the whole space problem, the (algebraic) decay rates turn out to be optimal. In the case of bounded domains, algebraic and exponential decay rates are shown to hold depending on the nonlinearities. The proofs of the results rely on the use of the entropy functional together with generalized Nash inequalities (for the whole space problem) or Poincaré inequalities (for the bounded domain case).