The Aronson-B\'enilan estimate for a Lagrangian particle discretization of the Porous Medium Equation

Abstract

We consider a nearest neighbor, Lagrangian particle discretization of the one dimensional porous medium equation. We prove that the particle model satisfies a discrete analog of the celebrated Aronson-B\'enilan estimate, which we use to prove a growth estimate for the evolution of the support and an $L^\infty$ decay estimate which are both known to hold in the continuum. These estimates are uniform with respect to the number of particles. We also prove convergence of the scheme towards the solution to the porous medium equation in the full generality of $L^1$ initial data.