Large-time behaviour for anisotropic stable nonlocal diffusion problems with convection

Abstract

We study the large-time behaviour of nonnegative solutions to the Cauchy problem for a nonlocal heat equation with a nonlinear convection term. The diffusion operator is the infinitesimal generator of a stable Lévy process, which may be highly anisotropic. The initial data are assumed to be bounded and integrable. The mass of the solution is conserved along the evolution, and the large-time behaviour is given by the source-type solution, with the same mass, of a limit equation that depends on the relative strength of convection and diffusion. When diffusion is stronger than convection the original equation simplifies asymptotically to the purely diffusive nonlocal heat equation. When convection dominates, it does so only in the direction of convection, and the limit equation is still diffusive in the subspace orthogonal to this direction, with a diffusion operator that is a “projection” of the original one onto the subspace. The determination of this projection is one of the main issues of the paper. When convection and diffusion are of the same order the limit equation coincides with the original one.

Most of our results are new even in the isotropic case in which the diffusion operator is the fractional Laplacian. We are able to cover both the cases of slow and fast convection, as long as the mass is preserved. Fast convection, which corresponds to convection nonlinearities that are not locally Lipschitz, but only locally Hölder, has not been considered before in the nonlocal diffusion setting.