Spatial and Dynamical Chaos Generated by Reaction–Diffusion Systems in Unbounded Domains

Abstract

We consider in this article a nonlinear reaction–diffusion system with a transport term (L,∇ x )u, where L is a given vector field, in an unbounded domain Ω. We prove that, under natural assumptions, this system possesses a locally compact attractor $$\mathcal{A}$$ in the corresponding phase space. Since the dimension of this attractor is usually infinite, we study its Kolmogorov’s ɛ-entropy and obtain upper and lower bounds of this entropy. Moreover, we give a more detailed study of the spatio-temporal chaos generated by the spatially homogeneous RDS in $$\Omega = \mathbb{R}^{n}$$ . In order to describe this chaos, we introduce an extended (n + 1)-parametrical semigroup, generated on the attractor by 1-parametrical temporal dynamics and by n-parametrical group of spatial shifts ( = spatial dynamics). We prove that this extended semigroup has finite topological entropy, in contrast to the case of purely temporal or purely spatial dynamics, where the topological entropy is infinite. We also modify the concept of topological entropy in such a way that the modified one is finite and strictly positive, in particular for purely temporal and for purely spatial dynamics on the attractor. In order to clarify the nature of the spatial and temporal chaos on the attractor, we use (following Zelik, 2003, Comm. Pure. Appl. Math. 56(5), 584–637) another model dynamical system, which is an adaptation of Bernoulli shifts to the case of infinite entropy and construct homeomorphic embeddings of it into the spatial and temporal dynamics on $$\mathcal{A}$$ . As a corollary of the obtained embeddings, we finally prove that every finite dimensional dynamics can be realized (up to a homeomorphism) by restricting the temporal dynamics to the appropriate invariant subset of $$\mathcal{A}$$ .