Wellposedness and Decay Rates for the Cauchy Problem of the Moore–Gibson–Thompson Equation Arising in High Intensity Ultrasound

Abstract

In this paper, we study the Moore–Gibson–Thompson equation in $\mathbb {R}^N$, which is a third order in time equation that arises in viscous thermally relaxing fluids and also in viscoelastic materials (then under the name of standard linear viscoelastic model). First, we use some Lyapunov functionals in the Fourier space to show that, under certain assumptions on some parameters in the equation, a norm related to the solution decays with a rate $(1+t)^{-N/4}$. Since the decay of the previous norm does not give the decay rate of the solution itself then, in the second part of the paper, we show an explicit representation of the solution in the frequency domain by analyzing the eigenvalues of the Fourier image of the solution and writing the solution accordingly. We use this eigenvalues expansion method to give the decay rate of the solution (and also of its derivatives), which results in $(1+t)^{1-N/4}$ for $N=1,2$ and $(1+t)^{1/2-N/4}$ when $N\ge 3$.