Stability of receding traveling waves for a fourth order degenerate parabolic free boundary problem

Abstract: Consider the thin-film equation $h_t + \left(h h_{yyy}\right)y = 0$ with a zero contact angle at the free boundary, that is, at the triple junction where liquid, gas, and solid meet. Previous results on stability and well-posedness of this equation have focused on perturbations of equilibrium-stationary or self-similar profiles, the latter eventually wetting the whole surface. These solutions have their counterparts for the second-order porous-medium equation $h_t - (h^m){yy} = 0$, where $m > 1$ is a free parameter. Both porous-medium and thin-film equation degenerate as $h \searrow 0$, but the porous-medium equation additionally fulfills a comparison principle while the thin-film equation does not. In this note, we consider traveling waves $h = \frac V 6 x^3 + \nu x^2$ for $x \ge 0$, where $x = y-V t$ and $V, \nu \ge 0$ are free parameters. These traveling waves are receding and therefore describe de-wetting, a phenomenon genuinely linked to the fourth-order nature of the thin-film equation and not encountered in the porous-medium case as it violates the comparison principle. The linear stability analysis leads to a linear fourth-order degenerate-parabolic operator for which we prove maximal-regularity estimates to arbitrary orders of the expansion in $x$ in a right-neighborhood of the contact line $x = 0$. This leads to a well-posedness and stability result for the corresponding nonlinear equation. As the linearized evolution has different scaling as $x \searrow 0$ and $x \to \infty$, the analysis is more intricate than in related previous works. We anticipate that our approach is a natural step towards investigating other situations in which the comparison principle is violated, such as droplet rupture.