Long-time dynamics for a Cahn–Hilliard tumor growth model with chemotaxis

Abstract

Mathematical models that describe the tumor growth process have been formulated by several authors in order to understand how cancer develops and to develop new treatment approaches. In this study, it is aimed to investigate the long-time behavior of the two-phase diffuse-interface model, which was proposed in [11] to model a tumor tissue as a mixture of cancerous and healthy cells. Up to now, studies on the long-time behavior of this model have neglected chemotaxis and active transport, which have a significant effect on tumor growth. In this research, our main aim is to study this model with chemotaxis and active transport. We prove an asymptotic compactness result for the weak solutions of the problem in the whole phase-space $H^1 (\Omega) \times L^2 (\Omega)$. We establish the existence of the global attractor in a phase space denoted via mass conservation. We also prove that the global attractor equals to the unstable manifold emanating from the set of stationary points. Moreover, we obtain that the global attractor has a finite fractal dimension.