Stability of constant steady states of a chemotaxis model (Q2064568)

In this article, the following parabolic-elliptic version of the Keller-Segel system of chemotaxis is analysed: \[\begin{cases} u_t - \Delta u + \nabla\cdot (u \nabla\psi) = 0,&\quad t > 0,\ \ x \in \mathbb R^{n},\\ -\Delta \psi + \psi = u,&\quad t>0,\ \ x \in \mathbb R^{n},\\ u(0,x)=u_{0}(x),& \quad x \in \mathbb R^{n}, \end{cases} \tag{1}\] where \(u=u(t,x)\) and \(\psi=\psi(t,x)\) denote the density of cells and the concentration of a chemoattractant, respectively. The local existence and uniqueness of mild solutions to this problem are established (Theorem 2.1) in the uniformly local Lebesgue space \(L^p_{\text{uloc}}(\mathbb R^n)\). The latter is the space of locally \(L^p\) functions \(f\) with the finite norm \[\| f \|_{p,\text{uloc}} \overset{\text{def}}{=} \sup_{x \in \mathbb R^{n}}\|f\|_{L^p(B_1(x))},\] where \(B_1(x)\) is the unit ball in \(\mathbb R^n\) centred at \(x\). Main results of the paper are on the stability properties of the constant steady state solutions \[(u,\psi)\equiv(A,A),\quad A\in\mathbb R.\] System (1) is rewritten in the form of a Cauchy problem for \(u\), and it is verified that its constant steady state \(u\equiv A\) is locally stable for \(A<1\) (Theorem 2.3, Remark 4.8) and is unstable for \(A>1\) (Theorem 2.4) under perturbations \(u_0=A+v_0\) where \(v_0\in L^p(\mathbb R^n)\). Each theorem requires parameter \(p\) to belong to a suitably chosen range that depends on \(n\).