Cahn-Hilliard and Thin Film equations with nonlinear mobility as gradient flows in weighted-Wasserstein metrics
Abstract
In this paper, we establish a novel approach to proving existence of non-negative weak solutions for degenerate parabolic equations of fourth order, like the Cahn-Hilliard and certain thin film equations. The considered evolution equations are in the form of a gradient flow for a perturbed Dirichlet energy with respect to a Wasserstein-like transport metric, and weak solutions are obtained as curves of maximal slope. Our main assumption is that the mobility of the particles is a concave function of their spatial density. A qualitative difference of our approach to previous ones is that essential properties of the solution - non-negativity, conservation of the total mass and dissipation of the energy - are automatically guaranteed by the construction from minimizing movements in the energy landscape.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1201.2367,
title = {Cahn-Hilliard and Thin Film equations with nonlinear mobility as gradient flows in weighted-Wasserstein metrics},
author = {Stefano Lisini and Daniel Matthes and Giuseppe Savaré},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.2367},
year = {2014}
}