Exclusive traveling waves for competitive reaction–diffusion systems and their stabilities

Abstract

We study the existence, uniqueness and asymptotic behavior, as well as the stability of a special kind of traveling wave solutions for competitive PDE systems involving intrinsic growth, competition, crowding effects and diffusion. The traveling waves are exclusive in the sense that as the variable goes to positive or negative infinity, different species are close to extinction or carrying capacity. We perform an appropriate affine transformation of the traveling wave equations into monotone form and construct appropriate upper and lower solutions. By this means, we reduce the existence proof to application of well-known theory about monotone traveling wave systems (cf. [A. Leung, Systems of Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations: Applications to Biology and Engineering, MIA, Kluwer, Boston, 1989; J. Wu, X. Zou, Traveling wave fronts of reaction–diffusion systems with delay, J. Dynam. Differential Equations 13 (2001) 651–687] and [I. Volpert, V. Volpert, V. Volpert, Traveling Wave Solutions of Parabolic Systems, Transl. Math. Monogr., vol. 140, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1994]). Then, by using spectral analysis of the linearization over the profile, we prove the orbital stability of the traveling wave in some Banach spaces with exponentially weighted norm. Furthermore, we show that the introduction of some weight is necessary in the sense that, in general, traveling wave solutions with initial perturbations in the (unweighted) space C 0 are unstable (cf. [I. Volpert, V. Volpert, V. Volpert, Traveling Wave Solutions of Parabolic Systems, Transl. Math. Monogr., vol. 140, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 1994] and [D. Henry, Geometric Theory of Semilinear Parabolic Equations, Lecture Notes in Math., vol. 840, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1981]).