Improved intermediate asymptotics for the heat equation

This letter is devoted to results on intermediate asymptotics for the heat equation. We study the convergence towards a stationary solution in self-similar variables. By assuming the equality of some moments of the initial data and of the stationary solution, we get improved convergence rates using entropy/entropy-production methods. We establish the equivalence of the exponential decay of the entropies with new, improved functional inequalities in restricted classes of functions. This letter is the counterpart in a linear framework of a recent work on fast diffusion equations; see Bonforte et al. (2009) [18]. The results extend to the case of a Fokker–Planck equation with a general confining potential.