Bistable reaction equations with doubly nonlinear diffusion

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence and properties of traveling wave solutions in bistable reaction-diffusion equations with doubly nonlinear diffusion, revealing new wave behaviors and stability characteristics, especially in the slow and pseudo-linear cases.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of traveling waves in bistable reaction equations with doubly nonlinear diffusion, highlighting differences from classical models and extending to higher dimensions.

Findings

Traveling waves exhibit free boundaries in slow diffusion cases.

Different families of waves describe propagation and stability of solutions.

Asymptotic behavior analyzed for heterozygote superior reaction functions.

Abstract

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 $0\leq u(x,t)\leq 1$ 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 \cite{AA-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 \cite{AA-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").