Classification of type I and type II behaviors for a supercritical nonlinear heat equation

We study blow-up of radially symmetric solutions of the nonlinear heat equation ut=Δu+|u|^p−1u either on RN or on a finite ball under the Dirichlet boundary conditions. We assume and that the initial data is bounded, possibly sign-changing. Our first goal is to establish various characterizations of type I and type II blow-ups. Among many other things we show that the following conditions are equivalent: (a) the blow-up is of type II; (b) the rescaled solution w(y,s) converges to either φ^∗(y) or −φ^∗(y) as s→∞, where φ^∗ denotes the singular stationary solution; (c) u(x,T)/φ^∗(x) tends to ±1 as x→0, where T is the blow-up time.Our second goal is to study continuation beyond blow-up. Among other things we show that if a blow-up is of type I and incomplete, then its limit L¹ continuation becomes smooth immediately after blow-up, and that type I blow-up implies “type I regularization,” that is, (t−T)^1/(p−1)‖u(⋅,t)L^∞_‖ is bounded as t↘T. We also give various criteria for complete and incomplete blow-ups.