Stabilization by slow diffusion in a real Ginzburg-Landau system

Abstract

The Ginzburg-Landau equation is essential for understanding the dynamics of patterns in a wide variety of physical contexts. It governs the evolution of small amplitude instabilities near criticality. It is well known that the (cubic) Ginzburg-Landau equation has various unstable solitary pulse solutions. However, such localized patterns have been observed in systems in which there are two competing instability mechanisms. In such systems, the evolution of instabilities is described by a Ginzburg-Landau equation coupled to a diffusion equation. In this article we study the influence of this additional diffusion equation on the pulse solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau equation in light of recently developed insights into the effects of slow diffusion on the stability of pulses. Therefore, we consider the limit case of slow diffusion, i.e., the situation in which the additional diffusion equation acts on a long spatial scale. We show that the solitary pulse solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equation persists under this coupling. We use the Evans function method to analyze the effect of the slow diffusion and to show that it acts as a control mechanism that influences the (in)stability of the pulse. We establish that this control mechanism can indeed stabilize a pulse when higher order nonlinearities are taken into account.