Uniqueness and stability of regional blow-up in a porous-medium equation

We study the blow-up phenomenon for the porous-medium equation in R^N, N1, u_t=Δu^m+u^m, m>1, for nonnegative, compactly supported initial data. A solution u(x,t) to this problem blows-up at a finite time . Our main result asserts that there is a finite number of points x₁,…,x_kR^N, with |x_i−x_j|2R^* for i≠j, such that Here w_*(|x|) is the unique nontrivial, nonnegative compactly supported, radially symmetric solution of the equation in R^N and R^* is the radius of its support. Moreover u(x,t) remains uniformly bounded up to its blow-up time on compact subsets of . The question becomes reduced to that of proving that the ω-limit set in the problem consists of a single point when its initial condition is nonnegative and compactly supported.