Travelling-wave behaviour in doubly nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations

TL;DR

This paper investigates traveling wave solutions in doubly nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations, revealing convergence properties and asymptotic behaviors, including logarithmic corrections in higher dimensions and extensions to non-symmetric initial data.

Contribution

It establishes the existence, uniqueness, and asymptotic convergence of traveling waves in doubly nonlinear equations, extending results to non-radial and unbounded initial data cases.

Findings

Unique traveling wave solutions with finite fronts are identified.

Solutions converge to traveling waves with a logarithmic correction in higher dimensions.

Asymptotic location of free boundaries and level sets is characterized.

Abstract

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 behaviour at the level 0, \normalcolor in which nonnegative solutions with compactly supported initial data have a compact support for any later time. For some results we will also require $p\ge2$ 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.