STABILITY OF PLANAR FRONTS FOR A NON-LOCAL PHASE KINETICS EQUATION WITH A CONSERVATION LAW IN D ≤ 3

Abstract

We consider, in a D-dimensional cylinder, a non-local evolution equation that describes the evolution of the local magnetization in a continuum limit of an Ising spin system with Kawasaki dynamics and Kac potentials. We consider sub-critical temperatures, for which there are two local spatially homogeneous equilibria, and show a local nonlinear stability result for the minimum free energy profiles for the magnetization at the interface between regions of these two different local equilibrium; i.e. the planar fronts: We show that an initial perturbation of a front that is sufficiently small in L2 norm, and sufficiently localized yields a solution that relaxes to another front, selected by a conservation law, in the L1 norm at an algebraic rate that we explicitly estimate. We also obtain rates for the relaxation in the L2 norm and the rate of decrease of the excess free energy.