A new approach to transport equations associated to a regular field: Trace results and well-posedness (Q843995)

This paper studies the well-posedness of the initial-boundary value problem for the transport equation \[ \partial_t f({\mathbf x}, t) + {\mathcal F}({\mathbf x}) \cdot \nabla _{\mathbf x}f({\mathbf x}, t) = 0 \quad ({\mathbf x} \in \Omega, \;t > 0), \] where \({\mathcal F}({\mathbf x})\) is a regular field in a domain \(\Omega\) of \(n\)-dimensional Euclidean space. The initial and boundary conditions are \[ f({\mathbf x}, 0) = f_0({\mathbf x}) \quad ({\mathbf x} \in \Omega) , \qquad f|_{\Gamma_-}({\mathbf y}, t) = \psi_-({\mathbf y}, t) \quad ({\mathbf y} \in \Gamma_- , \;t > 0), \] where \(\Gamma_-\) is a subset of the boundary \(\Gamma.\) The problem is considered in \(L^1(\Omega, \mu),\) where \(\mu\) is a general positive Radon measure in \(\Omega.\) This requires new definitions of both the transport operator and the trace measures over the incoming and outgoing parts of \(\Gamma.\) The results include well-posedness of transport problems and a complete characterization of the generator of the free streaming semigroup with no incoming boundary conditions.