The waiting time phenomenon in spatially discretized porous medium and thin film equations

Various degenerate diffusion equations exhibit a waiting time phenomenon: depending on the “flatness” of the compactly supported initial datum at the boundary of the support, the support of the solution may not expand for a certain amount of time. We show that this phenomenon is captured by particular Lagrangian discretizations of the porous medium and the thin film equations, and we obtain sufficient criteria for the occurrence of waiting times that are consistent with the known ones for the original PDEs. For the spatially discrete solution, the waiting time phenomenon refers to a deviation of the edge of support from its original position by a quantity comparable to the mesh width, over a mesh-independent time interval. Our proof is based on estimates on the fluid velocity in Lagrangian coordinates. Combining weighted entropy estimates with an iteration technique à la Stampacchia leads to upper bounds on free boundary propagation. Numerical simulations show that the phenomenon is already clearly visible for relatively coarse discretizations.