Regularity and structure of scalar conservation laws
Regularity and structure of scalar conservation laws
Scalar conservation law equations develop jump discontinuities even when the initial data is smooth. Ideally, we would expect these discontinuities to be confined to a collection of codimension-one surfaces, and the solution to be relatively smoother away from these jumps. The picture is less clear for rough initial data which is merely bounded. While a linear transport equation may have arbitrarily rough solutions, genuinly nonlinear conservation laws have a subtle regularization effect. We prove that the entropy solution will become immediately continuous outside of a codimension-one rectifiable set, that all entropy dissipation is concentrated on the closure of this set, and that the L^\infty norm of the solution decays at a certain rate as t goes to infinity.