On the loss of continuity for super-critical drift-diffusion equations

Abstract

We show that there exist solutions of drift-diffusion equations in two dimensions with divergence-free super-critical drifts, that become discontinuous in finite time. We consider classical as well as fractional diffusion. However, in the case of classical diffusion and time-independent drifts we prove that solutions satisfy a modulus of continuity depending only on the local $L^1$ norm of the drift, which is a super-critical quantity.