Hamilton-Jacobi Equations with Discontinuous Source Terms

Abstract

We study the initial-value problem for a Hamilton-Jacobi equation whose Hamiltonian is discontinuous with respect to state variables. Our motivation comes from a model describing the two dimensional nucleation in crystal growth phenomena. A typical equation has a semicontinuous source term. We introduce a new notion of viscosity solutions and prove among other results that the initial-value problem admits a unique global-in-time uniformly continuous solution for any bounded uniformly continuous initial data. We also give a representation formula of the solution as a value function by the optimal control theory with a semicontinuous running cost function.