2017/07/05 by Alessandro Audrito, Audrito, Alessandro · 1 citation
Computer Science · Mathematics · Medicine · #35C07 #35K55 #35K57 #35K65 #Advanced Mathematical Modeling in Engineering #Analysis of PDEs (math.AP) #FOS: Mathematics #Mathematical Biology Tumor Growth #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1707.01240
openalex publication_date 2017/07/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Reaction-diffusion equations appear in biology and chemistry, and combine linear diffusion with different kind of reaction terms. Some of them are remarkable from the mathematical point of view, since they admit families of travelling waves that describe the asymptotic behaviour of a larger class of solutions 0≤ u(x,t)≤ 1 of the problem posed in the real line. We investigate here the existence of waves with constant propagation speed, when the linear diffusion is replaced by the "slow" doubly nonlinear diffusion. In the present setting we consider bistable reaction terms, which present interesting differences w.r.t. the Fisher-KPP framework recently studied in \citeAA-JLV:art. We find different families of travelling waves that are employed to describe the wave propagation of more general solutions and to study the stability/instability of the steady states, even when we extend the study to several space dimensions. A similar study is performed in the critical case that we call "pseudo-linear", i.e., when the operator is still nonlinear but has homogeneity one. With respect to the classical model and the "pseudo-linear" case, the travelling waves of the "slow" diffusion setting exhibit free boundaries. Finally, as a complement of \citeAA-JLV:art, we study the asymptotic behaviour of more general solutions in the presence of a "heterozygote superior" reaction function and doubly nonlinear diffusion ("slow" and "pseudo-linear").