On a reaction-diffusion equation with Robin and free boundary conditions (Q2342717)

This paper is concerned with the following free boundary problem \[ \begin{cases} u_{t}=u_{xx}+f(u),0<x<h(t),\quad &t>0,\\ u(0,t)=bu_{x}(0,t),\quad &t>0,\\ u(h(t),t)=0,h^{\prime }(t)=-u_{x}(h(t),t),\quad &t>0,\\ h(0)=h_{0},u(x,0)=\sigma \phi (x),\quad &0\leq x\leq h_{0}, \end{cases} \] where \(b\in [ 0,\infty ),\sigma \geq 0\), \(\phi \) is a \(C^{2}\) function with compact support, and \(f\in C^{1}([0,\infty ))\) is an unbalanced bistable nonlinearity satisfying \(f(0)=0>f^{\prime }(0)\) and \[ \begin{cases} f(u)<0, &u\in (0,\alpha )\cup (0,\infty ),\\f(u)>0, &u\in (\alpha ,1),\end{cases} \] with \[ \inf_{s>0}\frac{f(s)}{s}>-\infty \] and \[ F(u)=-2\int_{0}^{u}f(s)ds \] with \(F(\theta )=0\) for some \(\theta \in (\alpha ,1)\). Assuming that \(b\in [ 0,\infty )\) and \(\phi \) are fixed, the authors obtain a \(\sigma ^{\ast }>0\) with the following properties. {\parindent=6mm \begin{itemize}\item[(1)] When \(\sigma <\sigma ^{\ast }\), there exists \(M>0\) such that \(h(t)<M\) and \( \lim_{t\rightarrow \infty }u(\cdot ,t)=0\) uniformly in \([0,h(t))\). \item[(2)] When \(\sigma >\sigma ^{\ast }\), then spreading happens, that is, \(\lim_{t\to\infty}h(t)=\infty\). \item[(3)] When \(\sigma =\sigma ^{\ast }\), then \(\lim_{t\rightarrow \infty }h(t)=\infty \) and \(\lim_{t\rightarrow \infty }u(\cdot ,t)=V\) locally uniformly in \( [0,\infty )\), where \(V\) is the unique even positive solution of \(V^{\prime \prime }+f(V)=0,V(\infty )=0\). \end{itemize}} In particular, the authors study the asymptotic speed and the asymptotic profile of spreading solutions if \(\sigma \geq \sigma ^{\ast }\).