Heat-content and diffusive leakage from material sets in the low-diffusivity limit

Abstract: We generalize leading-order asymptotics of a form of the heat content of a submanifold (van den Berg & Gilkey 2015) to the setting of time-dependent diffusion processes in the limit of vanishing diffusivity. Such diffusion processes arise naturally when advection-diffusion processes are viewed in Lagrangian coordinates. We prove that as diffusivity $\varepsilon$ goes to zero, the diffusive transport out of a material set $S$ under the time-dependent, mass-preserving advection-diffusion equation with initial condition given by the characteristic function $\mathds{1}_S$, is $\sqrt{\varepsilon/\pi} d\overline{A}(\partial S) + o(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$. The surface measure $d\overline A$ is that of the so-called geometry of mixing, as introduced in (Karrasch & Keller, 2020). We apply our result to the characterisation of coherent structures in time-dependent dynamical systems.