Existence and stability of propagating fronts for an autocatalytic reaction-diffusion system (Q1808336)

A one-dimensional reaction-diffusion system is studied that describes an isothermal autocatalytic chemical reaction involving both quadratic and cubic autocatalysis. The descriptive parameters are \(D\), the ratio of the diffusion constants and \(k\), the relative activity of the cubic reaction. It is shown that for all values of \(D>0\) and \(k\geq 0\) there exists a family of propagating fronts (travelling waves) that describe the advance of the reaction. It is shown by means of energy functionals that, if \(D\) is close to 1 and \(k\) is sufficiently small, the propagating fronts are stable against small perturbations in exponentially weighted Sobolev spaces.