Duality solutions for pressureless gases, monotone scalar conservation laws, and uniqueness (Q4719940)

The pressureless gas dynamic system \(\rho _t +\) \((\rho u)_x =0\), \((\rho u)_t +\) \((\rho u^2)_x =0,\) is considered. A notion of duality solution is used to treat the system as a pair of linear equations with the discontinuous coefficient \(u\) and the unknown \(\rho\) and \(q=\rho u\). Such solutions satisfy the system in the distribution sense, as well as the entropy inequality. The duality solutions are shown to be weakly stable. This leads to a global existence result via an approximation by sticky particles which turn out to be duality solutions. It is proved that, given a duality solution \((\rho ,q)\), there exists some Lipschitz continuous function \(f\) and a monotone entropy solution \(M\) of the equation \(M_t +\) \(f(M)_x =0\) such that \(\rho =M_x ,\) \(\rho u =f(M)_x .\) This has two consequences: on one hand, uniqueness for entropy solutions to the scalar conservation law implies uniqueness for duality solutions; on the other hand, the definition of duality solutions gives an analogue of the Oleinik entropy condition for monotone scalar conservation laws without any convexity assumption on the flux \(f\). The uniqueness of the scalar conservation law results from the study of convex solutions to a Hamilton-Jacobi equation.