Daily Papers

We propose in this work a novel iterative direct sampling method for imaging moving inhomogeneities in parabolic problems using boundary measurements. It can efficiently identify the locations and shapes of moving inhomogeneities when very limited data are available, even with only one pair of lateral Cauchy data, and enjoys remarkable numerical stability for noisy data and over an extended time horizon. The method is formulated in an abstract framework, and is applicable to linear and nonlinear parabolic problems, including linear, nonlinear, and mixed-type inhomogeneities. Numerical experiments across diverse scenarios show its effectiveness and robustness against the data noise.

We prove the first classification of blow-up rates of the critical norm for solutions of the energy supercritical nonlinear heat equation, without any assumptions such as radial symmetry or sign conditions. Moreover, the blow-up rates we obtain are optimal, for solutions that blow-up with bounded L^{n(p-1)/2,infty}(R^n)-norm up to the blow-up time. We establish these results by proving quantitative estimates for the energy supercritical nonlinear heat equation with a robust new strategy based on quantitative varepsilon-regularity criterion averaged over certain comparable time scales. With this in hand, we then produce the quantitative estimates using arguments inspired by Palasek [31] and Tao [38] involving quantitative Carleman inequalities applied to the Navier-Stokes equations. Our work shows that energy structure is not essential for establishing blow-up rates of the critical norm for parabolic problems with a scaling symmetry. This paves the way for establishing such critical norm blow-up rates for other nonlinear parabolic equations.

Inverse Stefan problem arising in modeling of laser ablation of biomedical tissues is analyzed, where information on the coefficients, heat flux on the fixed boundary, and density of heat sources are missing and must be found along with the temperature and free boundary. Optimal control framework is employed, where the missing data and the free boundary are components of the control vector, and optimality criteria are based on the final moment measurement of the temperature and position of the free boundary. Discretization by finite differences is pursued, and convergence of the discrete optimal control problems to the original problem is proven.

We consider the inverse Stefan type free boundary problem, where information on the boundary heat flux and density of the sources are missing and must be found along with the temperature and the free boundary. We pursue optimal control framework where boundary heat flux, density of sources, and free boundary are components of the control vector. The optimality criteria consists of the minimization of the L_2-norm declinations of the temperature measurements at the final moment, phase transition temperature, and final position of the free boundary. We prove the Frechet differentiability in Besov spaces, and derive the formula for the Frechet differential under minimal regularity assumptions on the data. The result implies a necessary condition for optimal control and opens the way to the application of projective gradient methods in Besov spaces for the numerical solution of the inverse Stefan problem.

Following Dibenedetto's intrinsic scaling method, we prove local H\"older continuity of weak solutions to obstacle problems related to some anisotropic parabolic equations under the condition for which only H\"older's continuity of the obstacle is known.

We analyze the state constrained inverse Stefan type parabolic free boundary problem as an optimal control problem in the Sobolev-Besov spaces framework. Boundary heat flux, density of heat sources, and free boundary are components of the control vector. Cost functional is the sum of the L_2-norm declinations of the temperature measurement at the final moment, the phase transition temperature, the final position of the free boundary, and the penalty term, taking into account the state constraint on the temperature. We prove the existence of optimal control, Frechet differentiability, and optimality condition in the Besov spaces under minimal regularity assumptions on the data. We pursue space-time discretization through finite differences and prove that the sequence of discrete optimal control problems converges to the original problem both with respect to functional and control.

In this work, we prove existence and uniqueness of a bounded viscosity solution for the Cauchy problem of degenerate parabolic equations with variable exponent coefficients. We construct the solution directly using the stochastic representation, then verify it satisfies the Cauchy problem. The corresponding SDE, on the other hand, allows the drift and diffusion coefficients to respond nonlinearly to the current state through the state-dependent variable exponents, and thus, extends the expressive power of classical SDEs to better capture complex dynamics. To validate our theoretical framework, we conduct comprehensive numerical experiments comparing finite difference solutions (Crank-Nicolson on logarithmic grids) with Monte Carlo simulations of the SDE.