Spatial instabilities in reaction random walks with direction-independent kinetics.

Abstract

We study spatial instabilities in reacting and diffusing systems, where diffusion is modeled by a persistent random walk instead of the usual Brownian motion. Perturbations in these reaction walk systems propagate with finite speed, whereas in reaction-diffusion systems localized disturbances affect every part instantly, albeit with heavy damping. We present evolution equations for reaction random walks whose kinetics do not depend on the particles' direction of motion. The homogeneous steady state of such systems can undergo two types of transport-driven instabilities. One type of bifurcation gives rise to stationary spatial patterns and corresponds to the Turing instability in reaction-diffusion systems. The other type occurs in the ballistic regime and leads to oscillatory spatial patterns; it has no analog in reaction-diffusion systems. The conditions for these bifurcations are derived and applied to two model systems. We also analyze the stability properties of one-variable systems and find that small wavelength perturbations decay in an oscillatory manner.