Hopf bifurcation and exchange of stability in diffusive media (Q1879433)

The authors investigate Hopf bifurcation in the presence of continuous spectrum in a reaction-diffusion system. The Hopf bifurcation is caused by a pair of isolated eigenvalues crossing the imaginary axis. The major difficulty lies in the presence of a branch of essential spectrum touching the imaginary axis in the origin and leading to slow, diffusive stability of the trivial state, even in the absence of the critical Hopf mode. Under suitable assumptions on the nonlinearity, the authors can prove that the classical picture of exchange of stability carries over to this situation: the trivial solution is asymptotically stable before onset of instability, and after instability, there exists an asymptotically stable periodic solution bifurcating from the equilibrium. Stability is considered relative to spatially localized perturbations, which decay diffusively in the linear approximation.