Weakly supercritical dissipative structures on curved surfaces (Q1077276)

Cellular, low amplitude structures appearing at cylindrical and spherical fronts of gaseous combustion and laser evaporation are described. In the case of a spherical front all these structures are found to be unstable. When the cylindrical front of gaseous combustion is expanded, we must expect the quasi one-dimensional structure homogeneous with respect to the ignorable coordinate to be replaced by a parquet-like pattern of rectangular cells, and later to reach a non-stationary regime. On the cylindrical front of laser evaporation the quasi one-dimensional structure of maximum amplitude is globally stable. The purpose of this paper is to investigate such structures and their stability on cylindrical and spherical surfaces, and this corresponds to the problem of the propagation of a cylindrical or spherical flame through a gas, and of the laser evaporation of a spherical sample. Problems dealing with dissipative structures on curved surfaces are also of interest in biophysics, where a spherical surface models a cell membrane, while the cylindrical surface models the axon.