Large diffusivity and asymptotic behavior in parabolic systems (Q1081752)

Reaction-diffusion systems (1) \(\partial u/\partial t=D\Delta u+f(u)\) on bounded open sets in \(R^ n\) with Neumann boundary conditions are studied, where \(D=diag(d_ 1,...,d_ N)\), \(u=[u_ 1,..,u_ N]\), f is a \(C^ 2\) mapping in \(R^ n\). The systems under consideration may not have an invariant region in \(R^ n\). It is proved that any compact attractor for the corresponding ODE \((2)\quad du/dt=f(u)\) is also a compact attractor for (1) if \(d\lambda\) is sufficiently large. Here \(d=\min (d_ 1,...,d_ N)\), \(\lambda\) is the first nonzero eigenvalue of the Laplacian with Neumann boundary conditions. Any solution starting in a neighborhood of such an attractor is asymptotic to the solution of (2). The results hold also for systems with time delays.