Traveling phase interfaces in viscous forward-backward diffusion equations
Abstract
The viscous regularization of an ill-posed diffusion equation with bistable nonlinearity predicts a hysteretic behavior of dynamical phase transitions but a complete mathematical understanding of the intricate multiscale evolution is still missing. We shed light on the fine structure of propagating phase boundaries by carefully examining traveling wave solutions in a special case. Assuming a trilinear constitutive relation we characterize all waves that possess a monotone profile and connect the two phases by a single interface of positive width. We further study the two sharp-interface regimes related to either vanishing viscosity or the bilinear limit.
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