A blow-up phenomenon in the Hamilton-Jacobi equation in an unbounded domain

Konstantin Khanin, Dmitry Khmelev, Andrei Sobolevskii

Published 2003-12-20, updated 2005-04-07Version 2

We construct an example of blow-up in a flow of min-plus linear operators arising as solution operators for a Hamilton-Jacobi equation with a Hamiltonian of the form |p|^alpha+U(x,t), where alpha>1 and the potential U(x,t) is uniformly bounded together with its gradient. The construction is based on the fact that, for a suitable potential defined on a time interval of length T, the absolute value of velocity for a Lagrangian minimizer can be as large as O((log T)^(2-2/alpha)). We also show that this growth estimate cannot be surpassed. Implications of this example for existence of global generalized solutions to randomly forced Hamilton-Jacobi or Burgers equations are discussed.