A Stefan problem on an evolving surface

Abstract

We formulate a Stefan problem on an evolving hypersurface and study the well posedness of weak solutions given L 1 data. To do this, we first develop function spaces and results to handle equations on evolving surfaces in order to give a natural treatment of the problem. Then, we consider the existence of solutions for data; this is done by regularization of the nonlinearity. The regularized problem is solved by a fixed point theorem and then uniform estimates are obtained in order to pass to the limit. By using a duality method, we show continuous dependence, which allows us to extend the results to L 1 data.