Asymptotics near extinction for nonlinear fast diffusion on a bounded domain

Abstract

On a smooth bounded Euclidean domain, Sobolev-subcritical fast diffusion with vanishing boundary trace is known to lead to finitetime extinction, with a vanishing profile selected by the initial datum. In rescaled variables, we quantify the rate of convergence to this profile uniformly in relative error, showing the rate is either exponentially fast (with a rate constant predicted by the spectral gap), or algebraically slow (which is only possible in the presence of non-integrable zero modes). In the first case, the nonlinear dynamics are well-approximated by exponentially decaying eigenmodes up to at least twice the gap. This improves on a result of Bonforte and Figalli, by providing a new and simpler approach which is able to accommodate the absence of a spectral gap, as occurs when the vanishing profile fails to be isolated (and may belong to a continuum of such profiles).