Global continuation beyond singularities on the boundary for a degenerate diffusive Hamilton–Jacobi equation

Abstract

In this article, we are interested in the Dirichlet problem for parabolic viscous Hamilton–Jacobi equations. It is well-known that the gradient of the solution may blow up in finite time on the boundary of the domain, preventing a classical extension of the solution past this singularity. This behavior comes from the fact that one cannot prescribe the Dirichlet boundary condition for all time and, in order to define a solution globally in time, one has to use “generalized boundary conditions” in the sense of viscosity solution. In this work, we treat the case when the diffusion operator is the p-Laplacian where the gradient dependence in the diffusion creates specific difficulties. In this framework, we obtain the existence and uniqueness of a continuous, global in time, viscosity solution. For this purpose, we prove a Strong Comparison Result between semi-continuous viscosity sub and super-solutions. Moreover, the asymptotic behavior of u(x,t)t is analyzed through the study of the associated ergodic problem.