Ancient shrinking spherical interfaces in the Allen–Cahn flow

We consider the parabolic Allen–Cahn equation in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$, $n\ge 2$,

$u_t=\mathrm{\Delta }u+(1?u^2)u\text{ in }{\mathbb{R}}^n\times (?\infty ,0].$

We construct an ancient radially symmetric solution $u(x,t)$ with any given number k of transition layers between ?1 and +1. At main order they consist of k time-traveling copies of w with spherical interfaces distant $O(\log ?|t|)$ one to each other as $t\to ?\infty$. These interfaces are resemble at main order copies of the shrinking sphere ancient solution to mean the flow by mean curvature of surfaces: $|x|=\sqrt{?2(n?1)t}$. More precisely, if $w(s)$ denotes the heteroclinic 1-dimensional solution of $w^{″}+(1?w^2)w=0$$w(\pm \infty )=\pm 1$ given by $w(s)=\tanh ?\left(\frac{s}{\sqrt{2}}\right)$ we have

$u(x,t)\approx \sum _{j=1}^k{(?1)}^{j?1}w(|x|?{\rho }_j(t))?\frac{1}{2}(1+{(?1)}^k)\text{ as }t\to ?\infty$

where

${\rho }_j(t)=\sqrt{?2(n?1)t}+\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}(j?\frac{k+1}{2})\log ?\left(\frac{|t|}{\log ?|t|}\right)+O(1),j=1,\dots ,k.$

     

Exact asymptotics in eigenproblems for fractional Brownian covariance operators

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