Sharp extinction rates for positive solutions of fast diffusion equations

Abstract: Let $s \in (0, 1]$ and $N > 2s$. It is known that positive solutions to the (fractional) fast diffusion equation $\partial_t u + (-\Delta)^s (u^\frac{N-2s}{N+2s}) = 0$ on $(0, \infty) \times \mathbb R^N$ with regular enough initial datum extinguish after some finite time $T_* > 0$. More precisely, one has $\frac{u(t,\cdot)}{U_{T_, z, \lambda}(t,\cdot)} - 1 =o(1)$ as $t \to T_^-$ for a certain extinction profile $U_{T_, z, \lambda}$, uniformly on $\mathbb R^N$. In this paper, we prove the quantitative bound $ \frac{u(t,\cdot)}{U_{T_, z, \lambda}(t,\cdot)} - 1 = \mathcal O( (T_*-t)^\frac{N+2s}{N-2s+2})$, in a natural weighted energy norm. The main point here is that the exponent $\frac{N+2s}{N-2s+2}$ is sharp. This is the analogue of a recent result by Bonforte and Figalli (CPAM, 2021) valid for $s = 1$ and bounded domains $\Omega \subset \mathbb R^N$. Our result is new also in the local case $s = 1$. The main obstacle we overcome is the degeneracy of an associated linearized operator, which generically does not occur in the bounded domain setting. For a smooth bounded domain $\Omega \subset \mathbb R^N$, we prove similar results for positive solutions to $\partial_t u + (-\Delta)^s (u^m) = 0$ on $(0, \infty) \times \Omega$ with Dirichlet boundary conditions when $s \in (0,1)$ and $m \in (\frac{N-2s}{N+2s}, 1)$, under a non-degeneracy assumption on the stationary solution. An important step here is to prove the convergence of the relative error, which is new for this case.