new dissipated energy and partial regularity for thin film equations abstract we study the thin film equation h t h n h x x x x and prove that the energy h p h x 2 d x dissipates for suitable weak solutions when n p lies in the whole domain e defined by laugesen which extends partially the corresponding results of laugesen chugunova and taranets and then improve some previous results of partial regularity by chou and the first author

higher order nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations this paper is concerned with nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations of the form ut 1 m 1 d f u d2m 1u 0 with f u u n n 1 near u 0 and d x under appropriate boundary conditions it is shown that there exists a weak solution u some of the main results of the paper are that u 0 if u0 0 and that the support of u t when u0 0 increases with t for the last property we require that n 2 and m 1

doubly nonlinear thin film equations in one space dimension we consider a free boundary problem for a class of fourth order nonlinear parabolic equations which are degenerate both with respect to the unknown and to its third derivative the problem is relevant in the description of the surface tension driven spreading of a non newtonian liquid over a solid surface in the complete wetting regime relying solely on global and local energy estimates and on bernis inequalities we prove existence of solutions to this problem and obtain sharp upper bounds for the propagation of their support a necessary condition for the occurrence of waiting time phenomena is also derived

some global dynamical properties of the kuramoto sivashinsky equations nonlinear stability and attractors abstract the kuramoto sivashinsky equations model pattern formations on unstable flame fronts and thin hydrodynamic films they are characterized by the coexistence of coherent spatial structures with temporal chaos we investigate some global dynamical properties including nonlinear stability we demonstrate their low modal behavior in terms of determining modes and that the fractal dimension of all attractors is bounded by a universal constant times l 13 8 where l is a dimensionless pattern cell size in the one dimensional case such equations are indeed a paradigm of low dimensional behavior for infinite dimensional systems

traveling wave solutions to thin film equations thin films can be effectively described by the lubrication approximation in which the equation of motion is mathit h mathit t mathit h mathit n mathit h mathit x mathit x mathit x mathit x 0 here h is a necessarily positive quantity which represents the height or thickness of the film different values of n especially 1 2 and 3 correspond to different physical situations this equation permits solutions in the form of traveling disturbances with a fixed form if u is the propagation velocity the resulting equation for the disturbance is mathit uh mathit x mathit h mathit n mathit h mathit x mathit x mathit x mathit x here quantitative and qualitative solutions to the equation are presented the study has been limited to the intervals in x where the solutions are positive it is found that transitions between different qualitative behaviors occur at n 3 2 3 2 and 1 2 for example if u is not zero solitonlike solutions defined on a finite interval are only possible for n3 more specific results can be obtained in the case in which the velocity is zero solitons occur for n2 for n 1 the region 3 2n is characterized by the presence of advancing front solutions with support on ensuremath infty t for ng1 2 single minimum solutions diverging at ifmmode pm else textpm fi ensuremath infty are possible the generic solution present for all positive values of n is a receding front which diverges at finite x for n0

the lubrication approximation for thin viscous films regularity and long time behavior of weak solutions we consider the fourth order degenerate diffusion equation in one space dimension this equation derived from a lubrication approximation models the surface tension dominated motion of thin viscous films and spreading droplets 15 the equation with f h h also models a thin neck of fluid in the hele shaw cell 10 11 23 in such problems h x t is the local thickness of the the film or neck this paper considers the properties of weak solutions that are more relevant to the droplet problem than to hele shaw for simplicity we consider periodic boundary conditions with the interpretation of modeling a periodic array of droplets we consider two problems the first has initial data h0 0 and f h h n 0 n 3 we show that there exists a weak nonnegative solution for all time also we show that this solution becomes a strong positive solution after some finite time t and asymptotically approaches its means as t the weak solution is in the classical sense of distributions for 3 8 n 3 and in a weaker sense introduced in 1 for the remaining 0 n 3 8 furthermore the solutions have high enough regularity to just include the unique source type solutions 2 with zero slope at the edge of the support they do not include any of the less regular solutions with positive slope at the edge of the support second we consider strictly positive initial data h0 m 0 and f h h n 0 n for this problem we show that even if a finite time singularity of the form h 0 does occur there exists a weak nonnegative solution for all time t this weak solution becomes strong and positive again after some critical time t as in the first problem we show that the solution approaches its mean as t the main technical idea is to introduce new classes of dissipative entropies to prove existence and higher regularity we show that these entropies are related to norms of the difference between the solution and its mean to prove the relaxation result 1996 john wiley sons inc

on ks type equations describing the evolution and rupture of a liquid interface abstract study of core annular flow of two liquids of different viscosity generates two new amplitude equations of the kuramoto sivashinsky ks type in the first an integral operator of dispersive nature appends the ks it modifies the bifurcation structure of the ks and delays parametrically the appearances of a specific pattern the second modification specific to cylindrical geometry is due to a sensitive part in the curvature dispensed within a conventional expansion when retained it may cause a linearly unstable interface to rupture and to form experimentally observed bubbles

long wave instabilities and saturation in thin film equations hocherman and rosenau conjectured that long wave unstable cahn hilliard type interface models develop nite time singularities when the nonlinearity in the destabilizing term grows faster at large amplitudes than the nonlinearity in the stabilizing term phys d 67 113 125 1993 we consider this conjecture for a class of equations often used to model thin lms in a lubrication context by showing that if the solutions are uniformly bounded above or below e g are nonnegative then the destabilizing term can be stronger than previously conjectured yet the solution still remains globally bounded for example they conjecture that for the long wave unstable equation ht h n hxxx x h m hx x m n leads to blow up using a conservation of volume constraint for the case m n 0 we conjecture a dierent critical exponent for possible singularities of nonnegative solutions we prove that nonlinearities with exponents below the conjectured critical exponent yield globally bounded solutions specically for the above equation solutions are bounded if m n 2 the bound is proved using energy methods and is then used to prove the existence of non negative weak solutions in the sense of distributions we present preliminary numerical evidence suggesting that m n 2 can allow blow up

positive solutions of a semilinear elliptic equation with singular nonlinearity abstract this paper is devoted to the study of positive solutions of the semilinear elliptic equation u k x u p 0 x r n with n 3 and p 0 asymptotic behaviours of sky states and uniqueness of singular sky states are obtained via invariant manifold theory of dynamical systems the dirichlet problem in exterior domains is also studied it is proved that this problem has infinitely many positive solutions with fast growth

symmetric singularity formation in lubrication type equations for interface motion fourth order degenerate diffusion equations arise in a lubrication approximation of a thin film or neck driven by surface tension numerical studies of the lubrication equation le h t h n h xxx x 0 with various boundary conditions indicate that singularity formation in which h x t t to 0 occurs for small enough n with anomalous or second type scaling inconsistent with usual dimensional analysis this paper considers locally symmetric or even singularities in the le and in the modified lubrication equation mle h t h n h xxxx 0 both equations have the property that entropy bounds forbid finite time singularities when n is sufficiently large power series expansions for local symmetric similarity solutions are proposed for equation le with n 1 and mle for all n in mathbb r in the latter case special boundary conditions that force singularity formation are required to produce singularities when n is large matching conditions at higher order terms in the

on the correlation structure of some random point processes on the line abstract the correlation structure of some remarkable point processes on the one dimensional real line is investigated more specifically focus is on translation invariant determinantal permanental and or renewal point processes in some cases anomalous non poissonian fluctuations for the number of points in a large window can be observed this may be read from the total correlation function of the point process we try to understand when and why this occurs and what are the anomalous behaviors to be expected from examples it is shown that determinantal fermion point processes can be super homogeneous the number variance grows slower than the number mean and even hyper uniform when variance growth saturates renewal point processes with bounded spacings variance are essentially poissonian the number variance grows like the number mean as in poisson models under certain conditions permanental boson point processes can be sub homogeneous or critical in the sense that the number variance grows faster than the number mean we give several detailed examples illustrating these properties of interest together with unexpected behaviors

positive solutions to singular second and third order differential equations for quantum fluids we analyze a quantum trajectory model given by a steady state hydrodynamic system for quantum fluids with positive constant temperature in bounded domains for arbitrary large data the momentum equation can be written as a dispersive third order equation for the particle density where viscous effects are incorporated the phenomena that admit positivity of the solutions are studied the cases one space dimensional dispersive or non dispersive viscous or non viscous are thoroughly analyzed with respect to positivity and existence or non existence of solutions all depending on the constitutive relation for the pressure law we distinguish between isothermal linear and isentropic power law pressure functions of the density it is proved that in the dispersive non viscous model a classical positive solution only exists for small positive particle current densities both for the isentropic and isothermal case uniqueness is also shown in the isentropic subsonic case when the pressure law is strictly convex however we prove that no weak isentropic solution can exist for large current densities the dispersive viscous problem admits a classical positive solution for all current densities both for the isentropic and isothermal case with an ultra diffusion condition

positivity preserving numerical schemes for lubrication type equations lubrication equations are fourth order degenerate diffusion equations of the form h t nabla cdot f h nabla delta h 0 describing thin films or liquid layers driven by surface tension recent studies of singularities in which h to 0 at a point describing rupture of the fluid layer show that such equations exhibit complex dynamics which can be difficult to simulate accurately in particular one must ensure that the numerical approximation of the interface does not show a false premature rupture generic finite difference schemes have the potential to manifest such instabilities especially when underresolved we present new numerical methods in one and two space dimensions that preserve positivity of the solution regardless of the spatial resolution whenever the pde has such a property we also show that the schemes can preserve positivity even when the pde itself is only known to be nonnegativity preserving we prove that positivity preserving finite difference schemes have unique positive solutions at all times we prove stability and convergence of both positivity preserving and generic methods in one and two space dimensions to positive solutions of the pde showing that the generic methods also preserve positivity and have global solutions for sufficiently fine meshes we generalize the positivity preserving property to a finite element framework and show via concrete examples how this leads to the design of other positivity preserving schemes

nonnegative solutions of a fourth order nonlinear degenerate parabolic equation elena beretta michiel bertsch roberta dal passo communicated by m guatin o introduction in this paper we study nonnegative solutions of the fourth order equation 0 1 ut u uxxx x o where n is a real positive constant equation 0 1 is a nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation which is degenerate at points at which u vanishes it arises in several applications see the references in 2 4 5 6 in which u x t stands for a nonnegative quantity for example in the study of the dynamics of thin liquid films u denotes the thickness of the film or another relevant nonnegative quantity the case n 1 models the flow in a hele shaw cell while n 3 corresponds to viscous flow on a solid surface without slip driven by surface tension see also 6 7 8 for a related equation it is well known that fourth order equations do not satisfy a maximum principle in particular classical solutions of the linear equation ut u 0 may become negative in finite time bernis 8 friedman 2 have observed that if n is positive equation 0 1 has generalized solutions which remain nonnegative for all times in addition they show that the qualitative positivity of these solutions strongly depends on the value of n in more recent papers by kadanoff et al a combination of numerical calculations and matched asymptotics 4 and the analysis of travelling wave solutions 5 leads to results which suggest a very rich structure of the solutions of 0 1 it is the purpose of the present paper to clarify several aspects of the nonlinear equation 0 1 and its dependence on the parameter n our results lead to several conjectures and open problems as was pointed out in 4 for sufficiently small values of n solutions of 0 1 which are initially strictly positive may vanish at some point x 0 after a finite time to but to the best of our knowledge there is no rigorous proof of this phenomenon in the literature on the other hand it is of particular interest for applications for example if u denotes the thickness of a liquid film it implies that at time to the film breaks at xo

axisymmetric surface diffusion dynamics and stability of self similar pinchoff the dynamics of surface diffusion describes the motion of a surface with its normal velocity given by the surface laplacian of its mean curvature this flow conserves the volume enclosed inside the surface while minimizing its surface area we review the axisymmetric equilibria the cylinder sphere and the delaunay unduloid the sphere is stable while the cylinder is long wave unstable a subcritical bifurcation from the cylinder produces a continuous family of unduloid solutions we present computations that suggest that the stable manifold of the unduloid forms a separatrix between states that relax to the cylinder in infinite time and those that tend toward finite time pinchoff we examine the structure of the pinchoff showing it has self similar structure using asymptotic numerical and analytical methods in addition to a previously known similarity solution we find a countable set of similarity solutions each with a different asymptotic cone angle we develop a stability theory in similarity variables that selects the original similarity solution as the only linearly stable one and consequently the only observable solution we also consider similarity solutions describing the dynamics after the topological transition

singularities in a modified kuramoto sivashinsky equation describing interface motion for phase transition abstract phase transitions can be modeled by the motion of an interface between two locally stable phases a modified kuramoto sivashinsky equation h t 2 h 4 h 1 h 2 2 h 2 h xx h yy h xy 2 describes near planar interfaces which are marginally long wave unstable we study the question of finite time singularity formation in this equation in one and two space dimensions on a periodic domain such singularity formation does not occur in the kuramoto sivashinsky equation 0 for all 1 0 we provide sufficient conditions on the initial data and size of the domain to guarantee a finite time blow up in which a second derivative of h becomes unbounded using a bifurcation theory analysis we show a parallel between the stability of steady periodic solutions and the question of finite time blow up in one dimension finally we consider the local structure of the blow up in the one dimensional case via similarity solutions and numerical simulations that employ a dynamically adaptive self similar grid the simulations resolve the singularity to over 25 decades in h xx l and indicate that the singularities are all locally described by a unique self similar profile in h xx we discuss the relevance of these observations to the full intrinsic equations of motion and the associated physics

on the equation of a curved flame front abstract a strongly nonlinear spatially invariant equation for the dynamics of premixed flame is derived on the assumption that the curvature of the flame front is small the equation generalizes the corresponding weakly nonlinear equation obtained previously near the stability threshold

stability of cylindrical bodies in the theory of surface diffusion abstract perturbation arguments and finite element calculations are employed to study the nonlinear partial differential equations governing morphological changes induced by curvature driven diffusion of mass in the surface of an axially symmetric body isotropy of surface properties is assumed second and higher order perturbation analyses indicate that the familiar result of the linear theory of small amplitude longitudinal perturbations of a cylinder to the effect that a long cylinder is stable against all perturbations with spatial fourier spectra containing only wavelengths less than the circumference of the cylinder does not hold in the full nonlinear theory the perturbation analyses yield criteria for determining when longitudinal perturbations with high wave number spectra grow in amplitude after an initial decay followed by an incubation time and result in break up of the body into a necklace of beads the principal conclusions of the formal perturbation analyses are found to be in good accord with numerical solutions obtained by finite element methods

a global attracting set for the kuramoto sivashinsky equation new bounds are given for the l2 norm of the solution of the kuramoto sivashinsky equation partial t u x t partial x 2 partial x 4 u x t u x t partial x u x t for initial data which are periodic with periodl there is no requirement on the antisymmetry of the initial data the result is mathop lim sup limits t to infty left u cdot t right 2 leqslant const l 8 5

self adjoint sub classes of generalized thin film equations in this work we consider a class of fourth order nonlinear partial differential equation containing several un specified coefficient functions of the dependent variable which encapsulates various mathematical models used e g for describing the dynamics of thin liquid films we determine the subclasses of these equations which are self adjoint by using a general theorem on conservation laws proved by one of the authors nhi we find conservation laws for some of these partial differential equations without classical lagrangians

a positivity preserving numerical scheme for a nonlinear fourth order parabolic system noindent a positivity preserving numerical scheme for a fourth order nonlinear parabolic system arising in quantum semiconductor modeling is studied the system is numerically treated by introducing an additional nonlinear potential and a subsequent semidiscretization in time the resulting sequence of nonlinear second order elliptic systems admits at each time level strictly positive solutions which is proved by an exponential transformation of variables the stability of the scheme is shown and convergence is proved in one space dimension numerical results concerning the switching behavior of a resonant tunneling diode are presented

counting the stationary states and the convergence to equilibrium for the 1 d thin film equation abstract this paper is concerned with the one dimensional thin film equation u t x m u x 2 u x 2 p u 0 p u 1 u n m n u m 0 n m 0 in 0 l r with the homogeneous neumann boundary conditions u x x p u x x 0 l 0 u x x 0 l 0 for all t 0 we prove that for any given positive initial datum the number of positive stationary states is at most infinitely countable furthermore we prove that the solution of the evolution problem converges to an equilibrium as time tends to infinity