Global Smooth Solutions to a Thermoelastic Cauchy Problem in Phase Transitions

Abstract

We study one-dimensional viscoelastic phase transitions modeled by a Ginzburg--Landau energy with a non-convex cubic stress-strain law. Extending the isothermal model, we couple the momentum equation to a heat equation for the temperature field, giving a thermoelastic system with viscous, capillary, and thermal-diffusion terms. We prove global existence and uniqueness of classical smooth solutions for the Cauchy problem, using a traveling-wave decomposition, an exponential transformation of the mechanical perturbation, and coupled energy estimates at successive regularity levels. Under additional integrability and small-data assumptions, the temperature perturbation decays algebraically.