What we know about the two-phase Stefan problem under minimal assumptions

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 - 3:05pm for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Marianne Korten – Kansas State University, Manhattan
Organizer
Michael Westdickenberg
In this talk I will describe recent work with C. N. Moore about the two-phase Stefan problem with a degenerate zone. We start with local solutions (no reference to initial or boundary data) and then obtain intrinsic energy estimates, that will in turn lead to the continuity of the temperature. We then show existence and uniqueness of solutions with signed measures as data. The uniqueness problem with signed measure data has been open for some 30 years for any degenerate parabolic equation.