A comparison principle for a Sobolev gradient semi-flow

DOI10.3934/CPAA.2011.10.69MaRDI QIDQ651952zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Timothy Blass, Rafael de la Llave, Enrico Valdinoci

Publication date 19 December 2011

Published in Communications on Pure and Applied Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2214

zbMATH Keywords

comparison principleSobolev gradientsemigroups of linear operatorsfractional powers of elliptic operators

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Maximum principles in context of PDEs (35B50) Variational methods for second-order elliptic equations (35J20) Applications of functional analysis to differential and integral equations (46N20)

Abstract: We consider gradient descent equations for energy functionals of the type S(u) = 1/2 < u(x), A(x)u(x) >_{L^2} + int_{Omega} V(x,u) dx, where A is a uniformly elliptic operator of order 2, with smooth coefficients. The gradient descent equation for such a functional depends on the metric under consideration. We consider the steepest descent equation for S where the gradient is an element of the Sobolev space H^{�eta}, �eta in (0,1), with a metric that depends on A and a positive number gamma > sup |V_{22}|. We prove a weak comparison principle for such a gradient flow. We extend our methods to the case where A is a fractional power of an elliptic operator. We provide an application to the Aubry-Mather theory for partial differential equations and pseudo-differential equations by finding plane-like minimizers of the energy functional

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(1)

• A solution to a fractional order semilinear equation using variational method

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