Blow-up similarity solutions of the fourth-order unstable thin film equation

Abstract

We study blow-up behaviour of solutions of the fourth-order thin film equationwhich contains a backward (unstable) diffusion term. Our main goal is a detailed study of the case of the first critical exponentwhereN≥ 1 is the space dimension. We show that the free-boundary problem with zero contact angle and zero-flux conditions admits continuous sets (branches) of blow-up self-similar solutions. For the Cauchy problem inRN×R+, we detect compactly supported blow-up patterns, which have infinitely many oscillations near interfaces and exhibit a “maximal” regularity there. As a key principle, we use the fact that, for small positiven, such solutions are close to the similarity solutions of the semilinear unstable limit Cahn-Hilliard equationwhich are better understood and have been studied earlier [19]. We also discuss some general aspects of formation of self-similar blow-up singularities for other values ofp.