Improved entropy decay estimates for the heat equation are obtained by selecting well-parametrized Gaussians. Either by mass centering or by fixing the second moments or the covariance matrix of the solution, relative entropy toward these Gaussians is shown to decay with better constants than classical estimates.

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This paper is intended to be a first step towards the continuous dependence of dynamical contact problems on the initial data as v^iell as the uniqueness of a solution. Moreover, it provides the basis for a proof of the convergence of popular time integration schemes as the Newmark method. We study a frictionless dynamical contact problem betvv'een both linearly elastic and viscoelastic bodies which is formulated via the Signorini contact conditions. For viscoelastic materials fulfilling the Kelvin-Voigt constitutive law, we find a characterization of the class of problems which satisfy a perturbation result in a non-trivial mix of norms in function space. This characterization is given in the form of a stability condition on the contact stresses at the contact boundaries. Furthermore, we present perturbation results for two well-established approximations of the classical Signorini condition: The Signorini condition formulated in velocities and the model of normal compliance, both satisfying even a sharper version of our stability condition.

The paper considers the time integration of frictionless dynamical contact problems between viscoelastic bodies in the frame of the Signorini condition. Among the numerical integrators, interest focuses on the classical Newmark method, the improved energy dissipative version due to Kane et al., and the contact-stabilized Newmark method recently suggested by Deuflhard et al. In the absence of contact, any such variant is equivalent to the Störmer-Verlet scheme, which is well-known to have consistency order 2. In the presence of contact, however, the classical approach to discretization errors would not show consistency at all because of the discontinuity at the contact. Surprisingly, the question of consistency in the constrained situation has not been solved yet. The present paper fills this gap by means of a novel proof technique using specific norms based on earlier perturbation results due to the authors. The corresponding estimation of the local discretization error requires the bounded total variation of the solution. The results have consequences for the construction of an adaptive timestep control, which will be worked out subsequently in a forthcoming paper. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000)35L85 · 74M15 · 74H15 · 65J15 Supported by the DFG Research Center Matheon, "Mathematics for key technologies: modelling, simulation, and optimization of real-world processes", Berlin.