On solvability of a time-fractional doubly critical semilinear equation, and its quantitative approach to the non-existence result on the classical counterpart

Abstract

We study a time-fractional semilinear heat equation $$\partial^{\alpha}_t u -\Delta u = u^{p},\ \ \mbox{in}\ (0,T)\times\mathbb{R}^N,\ \ u(0)=u_0\ge0$$ with $u_0\in L^{1}(\mathbb{R}^N)$ and $p=1+2/N$. Here $\partial_t^{\alpha}$ denotes the Caputo derivative of order $\alpha \in (0,1)$. Since the space $L^1(\mathbb{R}^N)$ is scale critical with $p=1+2/N$, this type of equation is known as a doubly critical problem. It is known that the usual doubly critical equation $\partial_t u-\Delta u=u^p$ does not have nonnegative global-in-time solutions, while the time-fractional problem does. Moreover, there exists a singular initial data which admits no local-in-time solution, while the time-fractional equation is solvable for any $L^{1}(\mathbb{R}^N)$ initial data. In this paper, we deduce a necessary condition imposed on $u_0$ for the existence of a nonnegative solution. Furthermore, we obtain corollaries that describe the collapse of the local and global solvability for the time-fractional equation as $\alpha \rightarrow 1$.