Amplitude equations for wave bifurcations in reaction–diffusion systems

Abstract

A wave bifurcation is the counterpart to a Turing instability in reaction–diffusion systems, but where the critical wavenumber corresponds to a pure imaginary pair rather than a zero temporal eigenvalue. Such bifurcations require at least three components and give rise to patterns that are periodic in both space and time. Depending on boundary conditions, these patterns can comprise either rotating or standing waves. Restricting to systems in one spatial dimension, complete formulae are derived for the evaluation of the coefficients of the weakly nonlinear normal form of the bifurcation up to order five, including those that determine the criticality of both rotating and standing waves. The formulae apply to arbitrary n-component systems ( n⩾3 ) and their evaluation is implemented in software which is made available as supplementary material. The theory is illustrated on two different versions of three-component reaction–diffusion models of excitable media that were previously shown to feature super- and subcritical wave instabilities and on a five-component model of two-layer chemical reaction. In each case, two-parameter bifurcation diagrams are produced to illustrate the connection between complex dispersion relations and different types of Hopf, Turing, and wave bifurcations, including the existence of several codimension-two bifurcations.