The porous medium equation with large initial data on negatively curved Riemannian manifolds

Abstract: We show existence and uniqueness of very weak solutions of the Cauchy problem for the porous medium equation on Cartan-Hadamard manifolds satisfying suitable lower bounds on Ricci curvature, with initial data that can grow at infinity at a prescribed rate, that depends crucially on the curvature bounds. The curvature conditions we require are sharp for uniqueness in the sense that if they are not satisfied then, in general, there can be infinitely many solutions of the Cauchy problem even for bounded data. Furthermore, under matching upper bounds on sectional curvatures, we give a precise estimate for the maximal existence time, and we show that in general solutions do not exist if the initial data grow at infinity too fast. This proves in particular that the growth rate of the data we consider is optimal for existence. Pointwise blow-up is also shown for a particular class of manifolds and of initial data.