Local well-posedness of 1D degenerate drift diffusion equation

Abstract

This paper proves the well-posedness of locally smooth solutions to the free boundary value problem for the 1D degenerate drift diffusion equation. At the free boundary, the drift diffusion equation becomes a degenerate hyperbolic-Poisson coupled equation. We apply the Hardy's inequality and weighted Sobolev spaces to construct the appropriate a priori estimates, overcome the degeneracy of the system and successfully establish the existence of solutions in the Lagrangian coordinates.

Keywords

• drift diffusion equation
• free boundary
• degeneracy
• local well-posedness