Behavior of Solutions Near the Flat Hats of Stationary Solutions for a Degenerate Parabolic Equation (Q4943698)

The author studies the behavior of solutions of the following degenerate parabolic equation: \[ u_t = \lambda(|u_x|^{p-2}u_x)_x + f(u), \quad (x,t)\in (0,1)\times (0,+\infty), \] \[ u(0,t) = u(1,t) = 0, \quad t\in (0,+\infty),\qquad u(x,0) = u_0(x), \quad x\in (0,1), \] where \(p>2\) and \(\lambda\) is a positive parameter. It is well known that there exists a stationary solution \(\varphi\) which has an open set \(\Omega\) where it is identically \(\pm 1\). The graph \(\{(x,\varphi(x))\); \(x\in\Omega\}\) is called flat hats. The main aim of the article under consideration is to study the behavior of a nonstationary solution when it stays in a neighborhood of a stationary solution with flat hats. The author exposes a sufficient condition for initial data \(u_0\) that the intersection points between the flat hats of \(\varphi\) and \(u\) never change as a function of \(t\) along \(u(\cdot,t;u_0)\). Moreover, for any \((x,t)\) where a solution \(u\) of the problem intersects flat hats of \(\varphi\), the reaction effect for \(u\) disappears, and there exists only diffusion effect for \(u\), whose coefficient is \(\lambda(p-1)|u_x|^{p-2}\). If the conditions fail, it is proved that the changing area of the intersection points is uniformly bounded for all \(t\). The rest of the article is devoted to the proof of a weak comparison theorem, stability properties for the positive stationary solution and the sign-changing stationary solutions with flat hats.