Unique continuation inequalities for the parabolic-elliptic chemotaxis system

Abstract

This paper studies the quantitative unique continuation for a semi-linear parabolic-elliptic coupled system on a bounded domain Ω. This system is a simplified version of the chemotaxis model introduced by Keller and Segel in [14]. With the aid of priori L∞-estimates (for solutions of the system) built up in this paper, we treat the semi-linear parabolic equation in the system as a linear parabolic equation, and then use the frequency function method and the localization technique to build up two unique continuation inequalities for the system. As a consequence of the above-mentioned two inequalities, we have the following qualitative unique continuation property: if one component of a solution vanishes in a nonempty open subset ω⊂Ω at some time T>0, then the solution is identically zero.