The diffusion of a population partly driven by its preferences (Q1592609)

The author studies the questions of existence and uniqueness of solutions of the nonlocal diffusion equation \[ -\frac{\partial}{\partial x_j}\left(a_{ij}(x,u(\varphi(x)))\frac{\partial u}{\partial x_i}(x)\right)+\lambda(x)u(x)=f(x)\quad \text{in }\Omega \] \[ u=0\quad \text{on }\partial\Omega \] as a model of the stationary density distribution \(u\) of a population with death rate \(\lambda\) and forcing term \(f\). The novel feature here is the dependence of the diffusion coefficients at the point \(x\) in \(\Omega\) on the value of \(u\) at a different point \(\varphi(x)\) in \(\Omega\) which allows for attraction or repulsion among the species. The paper begins with the one-dimensional (ordinary differential equation) case in which the existence of a weak solution is proved using Schauder's fixed point theorem and various conditions for uniqueness (or otherwise) are discussed using variational arguments. These arguments are then generalized to higher dimensions.