A diffusion equation in transparent media (Q882622)

The authors first investigate existence and uniqueness of the parabolic problem \[ u_t= \text{div}(a(u,Du))+K(G-cu),\;\;\text{in}\;\;Q_T=(0,T)\times \mathbb{R}^N,\;\;u(0,x)=u_0(x), \] where \(0\leq u_0(x)\), \(K,\;G\in L^1(\mathbb{R}^N)\cap L^\infty(\mathbb{R}^N)\), \(c\in \mathbb{R}^+\), \(a(z,\xi)=\nabla_\xi f(z,\xi)\), \(f\) being a function with a linear growth as \(\parallel\xi\parallel\to\infty.\) Next they consider the elliptic problem \[ u-c\; \text{div}\Bigl(u\frac{Du}{| Du| }\Bigr)=v\;\;\text{in}\;\;\mathbb{R}^N, \] define a notion of entropy solution and prove a result of existence and uniqueness for \(v\in (L^1(\mathbb{R}^N)\cap L^\infty(\mathbb{R}^N))^+.\) Thanks to the previous results and by using an approximation procedure they obtain existence and uniqueness of solutions for the problem \[ u_t= \text{div}\Bigl(u\frac{Du}{| Du| }\Bigr)+K(G-cu),\;\;\text{in}\;\;Q_T=(0,T)\times \mathbb{R}^N,\;\;u(0,x)=u_0(x). \] Explicit solutions for the Cauchy problem associated to the homogeneous equation \[ u_t= c\; \text{div}\Bigl(u\frac{Du}{| Du| }\Bigr) \] when the initial data are characteristic functions of special convex subsets or characteristic functions of an annulus are constructed.