Reaction-diffusion problems in cylinders with no invariance by translation. I: Small perturbations (Q1368895)

Existence and uniqueness of solutions \((c,u)\) of the reaction-convection-diffusion equation \[ a(x_1,y,u, \nabla u) \Delta u- \bigl(c+d (y)\bigr) \partial_1u +\vec q(x_1,y,u, \nabla u) \cdot \nabla u+f(u) +g(x_1,y,u, \nabla u)=0 \] in \(\Sigma= \{(x_1,y): x_1\in \mathbb{R}, y\in \omega\}\), with \(\partial u/ \partial \nu=0\) on \(\partial\Sigma\) and \(u(-\infty,\cdot) =0\), \(u(+ \infty,\cdot) =1\) are proved. Here \(\omega\) is a bounded smooth domain, \(\nu\) denotes the outward unit normal, the smooth coefficients are given and \(\underline c\) is the speed. The perturbation terms \(a\), \(\vec q\), and \(g\) are closed to \((1,\vec 0,0)\), a situation where such results were already known. In particular, the nonlinear diffusion behaves like the linear one \(\Delta u\). The nonlinearity \(f\) represents either the ignition temperature case arising in combustion or the bistable case. The author carries out an interesting extension to small perturbations of several peoples' works (Berestycki, Lions, Nirenberg, Vega). The main difficulty now is that invariance under translations in \(x_1\) is lost and this raises problems in order to show monotonicity and uniqueness of solutions. Local and global existence theorems are obtained by using a linearization procedure and the difficulties concerning uniqueness are overcome by using comparison results for travelling waves corresponding to some perturbations of \(f\) and then using the sliding method involving the maximum principle.