Theoretical Foundations of Incorporating Local Boundary Conditions into Nonlocal Problems

We study nonlocal equations from the area of peridynamics on bounded domains. We present four main results. In our recent paper, we have discovered that, on R, the governing operator in peridynamics, which involves a convolution, is a bounded function of the classical (local) governing operator. Building on this, as main result 1, we construct an abstract convolution operator on bounded domains which is a generalization of the standard convolution based on integrals. The abstract convolution operator is a function of the classical operator, defined by a Hilbert basis available due to the purely discrete spectrum of the latter. As governing operator of the nonlocal equation we use a function of the classical operator, this allows us to incorporate local boundary conditions into nonlocal theories. As main result 2, we prove that the solution operator can be uniquely decomposed into a Hilbert-Schmidt operator and a multiple of the identity operator. As main result 3, we prove that Hilbert-Schmidt operators provide a smoothing of the input data in the sense a square integrable function is mapped into a function that is smooth up to boundary of the domain. As main result 4, for the homogeneous nonlocal wave equation, we prove that continuity is preserved by time evolution. Namely, the solution is discontinuous if and only if the initial data is discontinuous. As a consequence, discontinuities remain stationary.