Variational approach to complicated similarity solutions of higher-order nonlinear PDEs. II (Q546204)

The paper continues the study of the Cauchy problem for three higher-order degenerate quasilinear partial differential equations in Part I [in: Sobolev spaces in mathematics II. Applications in analysis and partial differential equations. New York, NY: Springer; Novosibirsk: Tamara Rozhkovskaya Publisher. International Mathematical Series 9, 147--197 (2009; Zbl 1179.35074)] containing in the right-hand side the \(m\)-th iteration of the Laplacian. Special attention is paid to a combination of a Cartesian approximation and fibering to get new compactly supported similarity patterns. Using numerics, such compactly supported solutions are constructed for \(m=3\) and for higher orders. The ``smoother'' case of negative \(n\) is included, with a typical ``fast diffusion-absorption'' parabolic PDE \[ u_t = (-1)^{m+1}\Delta^m (|u|^n u)-|u|^n u, \] where \(n\in (-1,0)\), which admits finite-time extinction rather than blow-up. Finally, a homotopy approach is developed for some kind of classification of various patterns obtained by variational and other methods. Using a variety of analytic, variational, qualitative, and numerical methods allows the authors to justify that the above PDEs admit an infinite countable set of countable families of compactly supported blow-up (extinction) or traveling wave solutions.