Attractors for reaction-diffusion equations in unbounded domains (Q1809197)

The asymptotic behaviour of solutions for the following reaction-diffusion equation \[ {\partial u\over \partial t}=\nu \Delta u-\lambda u-f(u)+ g\quad \text{in }\mathbb{R}^n \times\mathbb{R}^+ \tag{1} \] is investigated. There \(\nu\) and \(\lambda\) are positive constants, \(g\) is a given function from \(L^2(\mathbb{R}^n)\), and the nonlinear function \(f\) satisfies the following conditions: \(f(u)u\geq 0\), \(f(0)=0\), \(f'(u)\geq-C\), \(|f'(u)|\leq C(1+|u|^r)\) with \(r\geq 0\) for \(n\leq 2\) and \(r\leq\min \{4/n;2/(n-2)\}\) for \(n\geq 3\). First the existence of a unique solution \(u(t)\) of equation (1) with the initial data (2) \(u(0)=u_0\) is shown, which establishes the existence of a dynamical system \(\{S(t)\}_{t\geq 0}\) such that \(S(t)u_0=u(t)\) in \(H=L^2 (\mathbb{R}^2)\). Later the asymptotic compactness of \(S(t)\) is shown. To overcome the difficulty of the lack of compactness of the Sobolev embeddings in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), the author approaches \(\mathbb{R}^n\) by a bounded domain and uses the compactness of the embeddings in bounded domains. The main result states that problem (1) (2) has a global attractor in \(H\). At the end the finite dimensionality of this global attractor is studied.