Stability of patterns on thick curved surfaces

TL;DR

This paper derives effective reaction-diffusion equations on thick curved surfaces and shows how surface thickness and curvature influence pattern stability, potentially stabilizing or destabilizing patterns in biological and chemical systems.

Contribution

It introduces a set of effective R-D equations accounting for surface thickness and analyzes their impact on pattern stability on curved geometries.

Findings

Surface thickness affects pattern stability.

Curvature and thickness jointly influence pattern rearrangement.

Thickness changes can stabilize or destabilize patterns.

Abstract

We consider reaction-diffusion equations on a thick curved surface and obtain a set of effective R-D equation to ${\cal O}(\epsilon^2)$, where $\epsilon$ is the surface thickness. We observe that the R-D systems on these curved surfaces can have space- dependent reaction kinetics. Further, we use linear stability analysis to study the Schnakenberg model on spherical and cylindrical geometries. The dependence of steady state on the thickness is determined for both cases, and we find that a change in the thickness can stabilize the unstable patterns, and vice versa. The combined effect of thickness and curvature can play an important role in the rearrangement of spatial patterns on thick curved surfaces.