Conservation of boundary decay and nonconvergent bounded gradients in degenerate diffusion problems (Q955883)

The author studies nonnegative classical solutions of the Dirichlet problem \[ \begin{aligned} & u_t = u^p\Delta u + g(u), \quad \text{in } \Omega\times (0,T)\\ &u|_{\partial\Omega} = 0,\\ &u|_{t = 0} = u_0, \end{aligned} \] in a bounded domain \(\Omega \subset\mathbb R^n\), with boundary of a class \(C^3\), where \(p > 1\), \(T > 0\), and \(g\,:\, [0,\infty) \to\mathbb R\) is a locally Lipschitz continuous in \([0,\infty)\) with \(g(0) = 0\). The first aim of this article is to clarify under which conditions an initially given algebraic boundary decay is inherited by solutions in the following sense. Suppose that \[ u_0(x) \leq c_1(\operatorname{dist}(x,\partial\Omega))^{\alpha}\quad \text{for all } x \in \Omega, \] with certain constant \(\alpha > 0\) and \(c_1 > 0\); does then \[ u(x,t) \leq C(T')(\operatorname{dist}(x,\partial\Omega))^{\alpha} \quad \text{for all \(x \in \Omega\) and } 0 < t < T' < T, \] hold with some appropriate large constant \(C(T')\)? The author proves that this is valid whenever either \(p \geq 2\), or \(p < 2\) and \(\alpha \geq 1/(p-1)\). For \(p \in (1,2]\) and \(g \equiv 0\), this complements a known result, according to which the lower estimate \[ u_0(x) \geq c_0(\operatorname{dist}(x,\partial\Omega))^{\alpha}, \quad \alpha < \frac{1}{p-1}, \quad c_0 > 0 \] implies the existence of \(T > 0\) and \(C > 0\) such that \[ u_0(x)\geq C\operatorname{dist}(x,\partial\Omega) \quad \text{for all \(x \in \Omega\) and } t \geq T. \] Moreover, using the obtained inequalities, the author proves that there exists some values of \(q \geq 1\) such that the particular equation \(u_t = u^pu_{xx} + u^q\) possesses positive classical solutions which are nondecreasing with respect to \(t\) and remain uniformly bounded in \(C^1(\bar\Omega)\) for all times, but do not converge in \(C^1(\bar\Omega)\) as \(t\to\infty\).