Using a generalized assumption of Osgood type, we prove a comparison result between viscosity sub and supersolutions of fully nonlinear, possibly strongly degenerate, parabolic equations under rather generale assumtpions. The principle allows to consider dependence on the gradient witha quadratic growth and also on complex zeroth-order terms. The result it applies in particular to a differential model for pricing Mortgage-Backed Securities.
We prove continuous dependence on initial data for a backward parabolic operator whose leading coefficients are Osgodd continuous in time. This result fills the gap between uniqueness and continuity results obtained so far.
The interest of the scientific community for the existence, uniqueness and stability of solutions to PDE's is testified by the numerous works available in the literature. In particular, in some recent publications on the subject an inequality guaranteeing stability is shown to hold provided that the coefficients of the principal part of the differential operator are Log-Lipschitz continuous. Herein this result is improved along two directions. First, we describe how to construct an operator, whose coefficients in the principal part are not Log-Lipschitz continuous, for which the above mentione…
We consider the following evolutionary Hamilton-Jacobi equation with initial condition: \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} \partial_tu(x,t)+H(x,u(x,t),\partial_xu(x,t))=0,\\ u(x,0)=ϕ(x), \end{cases} \end{equation*} where $ϕ(x)\in C(M,\mathbb{R})$. Under some assumptions on the convexity of $H(x,u,p)$ with respect to $p$ and the Osgood growth of $H(x,u,p)$ with respect to $u$, we establish an implicitly variational principle and provide an intrinsic relation between viscosity solutions and certain minimal characteristics. Moreover, we obtain a representation formula of the viscosity solution of th…
In their 1968 paper Fujita and Watanabe considered the issue of uniqueness of the trivial solution of semilinear parabolic equations with respect to the class of bounded, non-negative solutions. In particular they showed that if the underlying ODE has non-unique solutions (as characterised via an Osgood-type condition) {\em and} the nonlinearity $f$ satisfies a concavity condition, then the parabolic PDE also inherits the non-uniqueness property. This concavity assumption has remained in place either implicitly or explicitly in all subsequent work in the literature relating to this and other, …
It is shown that, for the bi-harmonic equation, an optimal regularity criterion of the vertex of typical paraboloids can be expressed in terms of Osgood-Dini integral conditions of Petrovskii's type for the heat equation derived in 1934. Some extensions of the first Fourier coefficent method to other PDEs are discussed. A survey on boundary point regularity for elliptic and parabolic PDEs is enclosed.
We prove a comparison result for viscosity solutions of (possibly degenerate) parabolic fully nonlinear path-dependent PDEs. In contrast with the previous result in Ekren, Touzi & Zhang, our conditions are easier to check and allow for the degenerate case, thus including first order path-dependent PDEs. Our argument follows the regularization method as introduced by Jensen, Lions & Souganidis in the corresponding finite-dimensional PDE setting. The present argument significantly simplifies the comparison proof in Ekren, Touzi & Zhang, but requires an $L^p-$type of continuity (with respect to t…
We study and compare two concepts for weak solutions to semilinear parabolic path-dependent partial differential equations (PPDEs). The first is that of mild solutions as it appears, e.g., in the log-Laplace functionals of historical superprocesses. The aim of this paper is to show that mild solutions are also solutions in a viscosity sense. This result is motivated by the fact that mild solutions can provide value functions and optimal strategies for problems of stochastic optimal control. Since unique mild solutions exist under weak conditions, we obtain as a corollary a general existence re…
We formulate a stochastic differential game in continuous time that represents the unique viscosity solution to a terminal value problem for a parabolic partial differential equation involving the normalized $p(x,t)$-Laplace operator. Our game is formulated in a way that covers the full range $1<p(x,t)<\infty$. Furthermore, we prove the uniqueness of viscosity solutions to our equation in the whole space under suitable assumptions.
This paper is concerned with the Minkowski convolution of viscosity solutions of fully nonlinear parabolic equations. We adopt this convolution to compare viscosity solutions of initial-boundary value problems in different domains. As a consequence, we can for instance obtain parabolic power concavity of solutions to a general class of parabolic equations. Our results apply to the Pucci operator, the normalized $q$-Laplacians with $1<q\leq\infty$, the Finsler Laplacian and more general quasilinear operators.
We consider the Cauchy problem for a stochastic scalar parabolic-hyperbolic equation in any space dimension with nonlocal, nonlinear, and possibly degenerate diffusion terms. The equations are nonlocal because they involve fractional diffusion operators. We adapt the notion of stochastic entropy solution and provide a new technical framework to prove the uniqueness. The existence proof relies on the vanishing viscosity method. Moreover, using bounded variation (BV) estimates for vanishing viscosity approximations, we derive an explicit continuous dependence estimate on the nonlinearities and d…
We present a new stability result for viscosity solutions of fully nonlinear parabolic equations which allows to pass to the limit when one has only weak convergence in time of the nonlinearities.
The classical Feynman-Kac identity builds a bridge between stochastic analysis and partial differential equations (PDEs) by providing stochastic representations for classical solutions of linear Kolmogorov PDEs. This opens the door for the derivation of sampling based Monte Carlo approximation methods, which can be meshfree and thereby stand a chance to approximate solutions of PDEs without suffering from the curse of dimensionality. In this article we extend the classical Feynman-Kac formula to certain semilinear Kolmogorov PDEs. More specifically, we identify suitable solutions of stochastic…
We study Phragmén-Lindelöf properties of viscosity solutions to a class of doubly nonlinear parabolic equations in $\mathbb{R}^n\times (0,T)$. We also include an application to some doubly nonlinear equations.
We study one-dimensional very singular parabolic equations with periodic boundary conditions and initial data in $BV$, which is the energy space. We show existence of solutions in this energy space and then we prove that they are viscosity solutions in the sense of Giga-Giga.
We study asymptotic decay rates of viscosity solutions to some doubly nonlinear parabolic equations, including Trudinger's equation. We also prove a Phragmén-Lindelöf type result and show its optimality.
The global equi-continuity estimate on $L^p$-viscosity solutions of parabolic bilateral obstacle problems with unbounded ingredients is established when obstacles are merely continuous. The existence of $L^p$-viscosity solutions is established via an approximation of given data. The local Hölder continuity estimate on the space derivative of $L^p$-viscosity solutions is shown when the obstacles belong to $C^{1, β}$, and $p>n+2$.
In this article we present several results concerning uniqueness of $C$-viscosity and $L_{p}$-viscosity solutions for fully nonlinear parabolic equations. In case of the Isaacs equations we allow lower order terms to have just measurable bounded coefficients. Higher-order coefficients are assumed to be Hölder continuous in $x$ with exponent slightly less than $1/2$. This case is treated by using stability of maximal and minimal $L_{p}$-viscosity solutions.
We consider viscosity solutions to nonlinear uniformly parabolic equations in nondivergence form on a Riemannian manifold $M$, with the sectional curvature bounded from below by $-κ$ for $κ\geq 0$. In the elliptic case, Wang and Zhang \cite{WZ} recently extended the results of \cite{Ca} to nonlinear elliptic equations in nondivergence form on such $M$, where they obtained the Harnack inequality for classical solutions. We establish the Harnack inequality for nonnegative {\it viscosity solutions} to nonlinear uniformly {\it parabolic equations} in nondivergence form on $M$. The Harnack inequali…
We study the relationship of viscosity and weak solutions to the equation \[ \smash{\partial_{t}u-Δ_{p}u=f(Du)} \] where $p>1$ and $f\in C(\mathbb{R}^{N})$ satisfies suitable assumptions. Our main result is that bounded viscosity supersolutions coincide with bounded lower semicontinuous weak supersolutions. Moreover, we prove the lower semicontinuity of weak supersolutions when $p\geq2$.
The paper concerns singular solutions of nonlinear elliptic equations, which include removable singularities for viscosity solutions, a strengthening of the Hopf Lemma including parabolic equations, Strong maximum principle and Hopf Lemma for viscosity solutions including also parabolic equations.
We provide a representation formula for viscosity solutions to a class of nonlinear second order parabolic PDE problem involving sublinear operators. This is done through a dynamic programming principle derived from [8]. The formula can be seen as a nonlinear extension of the Feynman--Kac formula and is based on the backward stochastic differential equations theory.
We provide a representation formula for viscosity solutions to a class of nonlinear second order parabolic PDEs given as a sup--envelope function. This is done through a dynamic programming principle derived from Denis, Hu, Peng (2010). The formula can be seen as a nonlinear extension of the Feynman--Kac formula and is based on the backward stochastic differential equations theory.
We study Phragmén-Lindelöf properties for viscosity solutions to a class of nonlinear parabolic equations of the type $H(Du, D^2u+Z(u)Du\otimes Du)+χ(t)|Du|^σ-u_t=0$ under a certain boundedness condition on $H$. We also state results for positive solutions to a class of doubly nonlinear equation $H(Du, D^2u)-f(u)u_t=0$.
We investigate the $C^{1+α}$-regularity of solutions of parabolic equations $\partial_{t}v+H(v,Dv,D^{2}v,t,x)=0$. Our main result says that under rather general assumptions there exist $C$-viscosity and $L_{p}$-viscosity solutions which are in $C^{1+α}_{loc}$. We allow $H$ to be just measurable in $t$ and for its principal part to have sufficiently small discontinuities as a function of~$x$. No Lipschitz continuity of $H$ with respect to $v,Dv$ is required.
In this paper, we show the existence and uniqueness of viscosity solution to the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem for a class of fully nonlinear parabolic equations. This extends recent results of Eyssidieux-Guedj-Zeriahi.
In this work we consider viscosity solutions to second order parabolic PDEs $u_{t}+F(t,x,u,du,d^{2}u)=0$ defined on compact Riemannian manifolds with boundary conditions. We prove comparison, uniqueness and existence results for the solutions. Under the assumption that the manifold $M$ has nonnegative sectional curvature, we get the finest results. If one additionally requires $F$ to depend on $d^{2}u$ in a uniformly continuous manner, the assumptions on curvature can be thrown away.
We show how a theorem about the solvability in $W^{1,2}_{\infty}$ of special parabolic Isaacs equations can be used to obtain the existence and uniqueness of viscosity solutions of general uniformly nondegenerate parabolic Isaacs equations. We apply it also to establish the $C^{1+χ}$ regularity of viscosity solutions and show that finite-difference approximations have an algebraic rate of convergence. The main coefficients of the Isaacs equations are supposed to be in $C^γ$ with respect to the spatial variables with $γ$ slightly less than $1/2$.
In this paper we find viscosity solutions to a coupled system composed by two equations, the first one is parabolic and driven by the infinity Laplacian while the second one is elliptic and involves the usual Laplacian. We prove that there is a two-player zero-sum game played in two different boards with different rules in each board (in the first one we play a Tug-of-War game taking the number of plays into consideration and in the second board we move at random) whose value functions converge uniformly to a viscosity solution to the PDE system.
We study a version of the strong minimum principle, and large time asymptotics of positive viscosity solutions to classes of doubly nonlinear parabolic equations of the form $$ H(Du,D^2u)-u^{k-1}u_t=0,\;\;k\geq 1,\quad\mbox{in $Ω\times [0,T)$},$$ where $Ω\subset \mathbb{R}^n$ is a bounded domain and $0<T\leq \infty$. The spatial operator $H$ is homogeneous with power $k$.
We introduce the notion of δ-viscosity solutions for fully nonlinear uniformly parabolic PDE on bounded domains. We prove that δ-viscosity solutions are uniformly close to the actual viscosity solution. As a consequence we obtain an error estimate for implicit monotone finite difference approximations of uniformly parabolic PDE.
The weak Harnack inequality for $L^p$-viscosity supersolutions of fully nonlinear second-order uniformly parabolic partial differential equations with unbounded coefficients and inhomogeneous terms is proved. It is shown that Hölder continuity of $L^p$-viscosity solutions is derived from the weak Harnack inequality for $L^p$-viscosity supersolutions. The local maximum principle for $L^p$-viscosity subsolutions and the Harnack inequality for $L^p$-viscosity solutions are also obtained. Several further remarks are presented when equations have superlinear growth in the first space derivatives.
In this work, we show existence and uniqueness of positive solutions of $H(Du, D^2u)+χ(t)|Du|^Γ-f(u)u_t=$ in $Ω\times(0, T)$ and $u=h$ on its parabolic boundary. The operator $H$ satisfies certain homogeneity conditions, $Γ>0$ and depends on the degree of homogeneity of $H$, $f>0$, increasing and meets a concavity condition. We also consider the case $f\equiv 1$ and prove existence of solutions without sign restrictions.
We consider a class of elliptic and parabolic problems, featuring a specific nonlocal operator of fractional-laplacian type, where integration is taken on variable domains. Both elliptic and parabolic problems are proved to be uniquely solvable in the viscosity sense. Moreover, some spectral properties of the elliptic operator are investigated, proving existence and simplicity of the first eigenvalue. Eventually, parabolic solutions are proven to converge to the corresponding limiting elliptic solution in the long-time limit.
We give a proof of existence and uniqueness of viscosity solutions to parabolic quasilinear equations for a fairly general class of nonconvex Hamiltonians with superlinear growth in the gradient variable. The approach is mainly based on classical techniques for uniformly parabolic quasilinear equations and on the Lipschitz estimates proved in [S.N. Armstrong and H.V. Tran, Viscosity solutions of general viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equations, Math. Ann., 361 (2015)], as well as on viscosity solution arguments.
We study the Cauchy problem for a scalar semilinear degenerate parabolic partial differential equation with stochastic forcing. In particular, we are concerned with the well-posedness in any space dimension. We adapt the notion of kinetic solution which is well suited for degenerate parabolic problems and supplies a good technical framework to prove the comparison principle. The proof of existence is based on the vanishing viscosity method: the solution is obtained by a compactness argument as the limit of solutions of nondegenerate approximations.
We introduce a notion of viscosity solutions for a general class of elliptic-parabolic phase transition problems. These include the Richards equation, which is a classical model in filtration theory. Existence and uniqueness results are proved via the comparison principle. In particular, we show existence and stability properties of maximal and minimal viscosity solutions for a general class of initial data. These results are new even in the linear case, where we also show that viscosity solutions coincide with the regular weak solutions introduced in [Alt&Luckhaus 1983].
In this paper, we develop a viscosity method for Homogenization of Nonlinear Parabolic Equations constrained by highly oscillating obstacles or Dirichlet data in perforated domains. The Dirichlet data on the perforated domain can be considered as a constraint or an obstacle. Homogenization of nonlinear eigen value problems has been also considered to control the degeneracy of the Porous medium equation in perforated domains. For the simplicity, we consider obstacles that consist of cylindrical columns distributed periodically and perforated domains with punctured balls. If the decay rate of th…
We derive regularity estimates for viscosity solutions to the parabolic normalized p-Laplace. By using approximation methods and scaling arguments for the normalized p-parabolic operator, we show that the gradient of bounded viscosity solutions is locally asymptotically Lipschitz continuous when $p$ is sufficiently close to 2. In addition, we establish regularity estimates in Sobolev spaces.
This paper proves Hölder continuity of viscosity solutions to certain nonlocal parabolic equations that involve a generalized fractional time derivative of Marchaud or Caputo type. As a necessary and preliminary result, this paper first shows that viscosity solutions to certain nonlinear ordinary differential equations involving the generalized fractional time derivative are Hölder continuous.
We derive two equivalent definitions of the viscosity solutions to the homogeneous sub-p- Laplace parabolic equations on the Heisenberg group, and characterize the viscosity solutions in terms of an asymptotic mean value formula. Moreover, we construct an example to show that these formulae do not hold in non-asymptotic sense.
This paper studies the regularity of the free boundary for viscosity solutions to a parabolic Bernoulli-type free boundary problem with variable coefficients. The main result is that Lipschitz free boundaries are $C^1$ with a normal vector that varies with a Hölder modulus of continuity in both space and in time. As a consequence, the viscosity solution satisfies the free boundary problem in a classical sense.
We prove the existence of a unique viscosity solution to certain systems of fully nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations with interconnected obstacles in the setting of Neumann boundary conditions. The method of proof builds on the classical viscosity solution technique adapted to the setting of interconnected obstacles and construction of explicit viscosity sub- and supersolutions as bounds for Perron's method. Our motivation stems from so called optimal switching problems on bounded domains.
In this paper we study linear parabolic equations on a finite oriented starshaped network; the equations are coupled by transmission conditions set at the inner node, which do not impose continuity on the unknown. We consider this problem as a parabolic approximation of a set of first order linear transport equations on the network and we prove that, when the diffusion coefficient vanishes, the family of solutions converges to the unique solution to the first order equations and satisfies suitable transmission conditions at the inner node, which are determined by the parameters appearing in th…
We consider the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem $\partial_t u - F(t,x,u,Du,D^2 u) = 0 on (0,T)\times \R^n$ in viscosity sense. Comparison is established for bounded semi-continuous (sub-/super-)solutions under structural assumption (3.14) of the User's Guide plus a mild condition on $F$ such as to cope with the unbounded domain. Comparison on $(0,T]$, space-time regularity and existence are also discussed. Our analysis passes through an extension of the parabolic theorem of sums which appears to be useful in its own right.
The master equation is a type of PDE whose state variable involves the distribution of certain underlying state process. It is a powerful tool for studying the limit behavior of large interacting systems, including mean field games and systemic risk. It also appears naturally in stochastic control problems with partial information and in time inconsistent problems. In this paper we propose a novel notion of viscosity solution for parabolic master equations, arising mainly from control problems, and establish its wellposedness. Our main innovation is to restrict the involved measures to certain…
We prove a stochastic representation formula for the viscosity solution of Dirichlet terminal-boundary value problem for a degenerate Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman integro-partial differential equation in a bounded domain. We show that the unique viscosity solution is the value function of the associated stochastic optimal control problem. We also obtain the dynamic programming principle for the associated stochastic optimal control problem in a bounded domain.
This paper is concerned with a general class of fully nonlinear parabolic equations with monotone nonlocal terms. We investigate the quasiconvexity preserving property of positive, spatially coercive viscosity solutions. We prove that if the initial value is quasiconvex, the viscosity solution to the Cauchy problem stays quasiconvex in space for all time. Our proof can be regarded as a limit version of that for power convexity preservation as the exponent tends to infinity. We also present several concrete examples to show applications of our result.
We prove that the moduli of continuity of viscosity solutions to fully nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations are viscosity subsolutions of suitable parabolic equations of one space variable. As applications, we obtain sharp Lipschitz bounds and gradient estimates for fully nonlinear parabolic equations with bounded initial data, via comparison with one-dimensional solutions. This work extends multiple results of Andrews and Clutterbuck for quasilinear equations to fully nonlinear equations.
The parabolic normalized p-Laplace equation is studied. We prove that a viscosity solution has a time derivative in the sense of Sobolev belonging locally to $L^2$.
In this paper, we first define the notion of viscosity solution for the following system of partial differential equations involving a subdifferential operator:\[\{[c]{l}\dfrac{\partial u}{\partial t}(t,x)+\mathcal{L}_tu(t,x)+f(t,x,u(t,x))\in\partialϕ(u(t,x)),\quad t\in[0,T),x\in\mathbb{R}^d, u(T,x)=h(x),\quad x\in\mathbb{R}^d,\] where $\partialϕ$ is the subdifferential operator of the proper convex lower semicontinuous function $ϕ:\mathbb{R}^k\to (-\infty,+\infty]$ and $\mathcal{L}_t$ is a second differential operator given by $\mathcal{L}_tv_i(x)={1/2}\operatorname {Tr}[σ(t,x)σ^*(t,x)\mathrm…
We obtain up to a flat boundary regularity results in parabolic Hölder spaces for viscosity solutions of fully nonlinear parabolic equations with oblique boundary conditions.
We study the boundary behavior of viscosity nonnegative solutions of fully nonlinear parabolic Pucci extremal operators. We establish local and global comparison theorems in $C^{1,1} cylinders, along with a backward Harnack inequality.
