An Asymptotic Analysis of Localized 3-D Spot Patterns for Gierer-Meinhardt Model: Existence, Linear Stability and Slow Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the existence, stability, and slow dynamics of localized 3-D spot patterns in the Gierer-Meinhardt reaction-diffusion system, revealing how pattern stability depends on inhibitor diffusivity ranges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive asymptotic classification of multi-spot patterns and their stability in 3-D domains for different inhibitor diffusivity regimes.

Findings

Asymmetric patterns are always unstable for large inhibitor diffusivity D.

Symmetric patterns can undergo competition or Hopf bifurcations depending on D.

Spot locations evolve slowly according to a gradient flow driven by a Green's function.

Abstract

Localized spot patterns, where one or more solution components concentrates at certain points in the domain, are a common class of localized pattern for reaction-diffusion systems, and they arise in a wide range of modeling scenarios. In an arbitrary bounded 3-D domain, the existence, linear stability, and slow dynamics of localized multi-spot patterns is analyzed for the well-known singularly perturbed Gierer-Meinhardt (GM) activator-inhibitor system in the limit of a small activator diffusivity $\varepsilon^2\ll 1$. Our main focus is to classify the different types of multi-spot patterns, and predict their linear stability properties, for different asymptotic ranges of the inhibitor diffusivity $D$. For the range $D={\mathcal O}(\varepsilon^{-1})\gg 1$, although both symmetric and asymmetric quasi-equilibrium spot patterns can be constructed, the asymmetric patterns are shown to be always unstable. On this range of $D$, it is shown that symmetric spot patterns can undergo either competition instabilities or a Hopf bifurcation, leading to spot annihilation or temporal spot amplitude oscillations, respectively. For $D={\mathcal O}(1)$, only symmetric spot quasi-equilibria exist and they are linearly stable on ${\mathcal O}(1)$ time intervals. On this range, it is shown that the spot locations evolve slowly on an ${\mathcal O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ time scale towards their equilibrium locations according to an ODE gradient flow, which is determined by a discrete energy involving the reduced-wave Green's function. The central role of the far-field behavior of a certain core problem, which characterizes the profile of a localized spot, for the construction of quasi-equilibria in the $D={\mathcal O}(1)$ and $D={\mathcal O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ regimes, and in establishing some of their linear stability properties, is emphasized.