The existence and stability of spike solutions for a chemotaxis system modeling crime pattern formation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence and stability of spike solutions in a chemotaxis system modeling crime patterns, extending previous work to higher dimensions and analyzing stability behavior depending on parameters.

Contribution

It establishes the existence of symmetric spike solutions in 1D and 2D and analyzes their linear stability, revealing different behaviors based on the reaction time ratio.

Findings

Stable spike solutions for small and large reaction time ratios in 1D.

Stable spike solutions for small reaction time ratios in 2D.

Hopf bifurcation leading to instability at large reaction time ratios in 2D.

Abstract

This paper is a continuation of the paper Berestycki, Wei and Winter \cite{Berestycki2014}. In \cite{Berestycki2014}, the existence of multiple symmetric and asymmetric spike solutions of a chemotaxis system modeling crime pattern formation, suggested by Short, Bertozzi, and Brantingham \cite{Short2010}, has been proved in the one-dimensional case. The problem of stability of these spike solutions has been left open. In this paper, we establish the existence of a single radial symmetric spike solution for the system in the one and two-dimensional cases. The main difficulty is to deal with quasilinear elliptic problems whose diffusion coefficients vary largely near the core. We also study the linear stability of the spike solutions in both one-dimensional and two-dimensional cases which show complete different behaviors. In the one-dimensional case, we show that when the reaction time ratio $\tau>0$ is small enough, or large enough, the spike solution is linearly stable. In the two-dimensional case, when $\tau$ is small enough, the spike solution is linearly stable; while when $\tau$ is large enough, the spike solution is linearly unstable and Hopf bifurcation occurs from the spike solution at some $\tau=\tau_h$.