The Stochastic Gierer–Meinhardt System

Abstract

The Gierer–Meinhardt system occurs in morphogenesis, where the development of an organism from a single cell is modelled. One of the steps in the development is the formation of spatial patterns of the cell structure, starting from an almost homogeneous cell distribution. Turing proposed different activator–inhibitor systems with varying diffusion rates in his pioneering work, which could trigger the emergence of such cell structures. Mathematically, one describes these activator–inhibitor systems as coupled systems of reaction-diffusion equations with different diffusion coefficients and highly nonlinear interaction. One famous example of these systems is the Gierer–Meinhardt system. These systems usually are not of monotone type, such that one has to apply other techniques. The purpose of this article is to study the stochastic reaction-diffusion Gierer–Meinhardt system with homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions on a one or two-dimensional bounded spatial domain. To be more precise, we perturb the original Gierer–Meinhardt system by an infinite-dimensional Wiener process and show under which conditions on the Wiener process and the initial conditions, a solution exists. In dimension one, we even show the pathwise uniqueness. In dimension two, uniqueness is still an open question.