English

The geometrical quantity in damped wave equations on a square

Differential Geometry 2007-06-04 v1

Abstract

The energy in a square membrane Ω\Omega subject to constant viscous damping on a subset ωΩ\omega\subset \Omega decays exponentially in time as soon as ω\omega satisfies a geometrical condition known as the "Bardos-Lebeau-Rauch" condition. The rate τ(ω)\tau(\omega) of this decay satisfies τ(ω)=2min(μ(ω),g(ω))\tau(\omega)= 2 \min(-\mu(\omega), g(\omega)) (see Lebeau [Math. Phys. Stud. 19 (1996) 73-109]). Here μ(ω)\mu(\omega) denotes the spectral abscissa of the damped wave equation operator and g(ω)g(\omega) is a number called the geometrical quantity of ω\omega and defined as follows. A ray in Ω\Omega is the trajectory generated by the free motion of a mass-point in Ω\Omega subject to elastic reflections on the boundary. These reflections obey the law of geometrical optics. The geometrical quantity g(ω)g(\omega) is then defined as the upper limit (large time asymptotics) of the average trajectory length. We give here an algorithm to compute explicitly g(ω)g(\omega) when ω\omega is a finite union of squares.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0706.0172,
  title  = {The geometrical quantity in damped wave equations on a square},
  author = {Pascal Hébrard and Emmanuel Humbert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0706.0172},
  year   = {2007}
}