A reaction-kinetic model for a two-species gas mixture undergoing pair generation and recombination reactions is considered on a flat torus. For dominant scattering with a non-moving constant-temperature background the macroscopic limit to a reaction-diffusion system is carried out. Exponential decay to equilibrium is proven for the kinetic model by hypocoercivity estimates. This seems to be the first rigorous derivation of a nonlinear reaction-diffusion system from a kinetic model as well as the first hypocoercivity result for a nonlinear kinetic problem without smallness assumptions. The analysis profits from uniform bounds of the solution in terms of the equilibrium velocity distribution.
We use a geometric approach to prove the existence of smooth travelling wave solutions of a nonlinear diffusion-reaction equation with logistic kinetics and a convex nonlinear diffusivity function which changes sign twice in our domain of interest. W
e determine the minimum wave speed, c*, and investigate its relation to the spectral stability of the travelling wave solutions.
We consider the inverse problem of determining a general semilinear term appearing in nonlinear parabolic equations. For this purpose, we derive a new criterion that allows to prove global recovery of some general class of semilinear terms from later
al boundary measurements of solutions of the equation with initial condition fixed at zero. More precisely, we prove, for what seems to be the first time, the unique and stable recovery of general semilinear terms depending on time and space variables independently of the solution of the nonlinear equation from the knowledge of the parabolic Dirichlet-to-Neumann map associated with the solution of the equation with initial condition fixed at zero. Our approach is based on the second linearization of the inverse problem under consideration.
We study a family of reaction-diffusion equations that present a doubly nonlinear character given by a combination of the $p$-Laplacian and the porous medium operators. We consider the so-called slow diffusion regime, corresponding to a degenerate be
haviour at the level 0, ormalcolor in which nonnegative solutions with compactly supported initial data have a compact support for any later time. For some results we will also require $pge2$ to avoid the possibility of a singular behaviour away from 0. Problems in this family have a unique (up to translations) travelling wave with a finite front. When the initial datum is bounded, radially symmetric and compactly supported, we will prove that solutions converging to 1 (which exist, as we show, for all the reaction terms under consideration for wide classes of initial data) do so by approaching a translation of this unique traveling wave in the radial direction, but with a logarithmic correction in the position of the front when the dimension is bigger than one. As a corollary we obtain the asymptotic location of the free boundary and level sets in the non-radial case up to an error term of size $O(1)$. In dimension one we extend our results to cover the case of non-symmetric initial data, as well as the case of bounded initial data with supporting sets unbounded in one direction of the real line. A main technical tool of independent interest is an estimate for the flux. Most of our results are new even for the special cases of the porous medium equation and the $p$-Laplacian evolution equation.
Reaction diffusion systems are often used to study pattern formation in biological systems. However, most methods for understanding their behavior are challenging and can rarely be applied to complex systems common in biological applications. I prese
nt a relatively simple and efficient, non-linear stability technique that greatly aids such analysis when rates of diffusion are substantially different. This technique reduces a system of reaction diffusion equations to a system of ordinary differential equations tracking the evolution of a large amplitude, spatially localized perturbation of a homogeneous steady state. Stability properties of this system, determined using standard bifurcation techniques and software, describe both linear and non-linear patterning regimes of the reaction diffusion system. I describe the class of systems this method can be applied to and demonstrate its application. Analysis of Schnakenberg and substrate inhibition models is performed to demonstrate the methods capabilities in simplified settings and show that even these simple models have non-linear patterning regimes not previously detected. Analysis of a protein regulatory network related to chemotaxis shows its application in a more complex setting where other non-linear methods become intractable. Predictions of this method are verified against results of numerical simulation, linear stability, and full PDE bifurcation analyses.
The thermalization of a gas towards a Maxwellian velocity distribution with the background temperature is described by a kinetic relaxation model. The sum of the kinetic energy of the gas and the thermal energy of the background are conserved, and th
e heat flow in the background is governed by the Fourier law. For the coupled nonlinear system of the kinetic and the heat equation, existence of solutions is proved on the one-dimensional torus. Spectral stability of the equilibrium is shown on the torus in arbitrary dimensions by hypocoercivity methods. The macroscopic limit towards a nonlinear cross-diffusion problem is carried out formally.