The role of delay and degeneracy on propagation dynamics in diffusion equations (Q2172792)

This paper is about traveling wave solutions and asymptotic spreading for a class of degenerate equations with time delay. The influence of delay and degeneracy on the propagation threshold and complete spreading or vanishing is explored. The authors first study the existence of traveling wave solutions by constructing proper super-solutions and show the monotonicity, asymptotic behavior and uniqueness up to translation of traveling wave solutions. Different from the nondegenerate case, their results reflect that the traveling wave solutions with critical speed decay exponentially, while those with non-critical speed may not decay exponentially. Then some sufficient conditions on the complete spreading or vanishing are given by using suitable super- and sub-solutions, which depend on the degeneracy of nonlinearity as well as the initial value. Finally, several degenerate equations are investigated, which shows that the large delay could slow down the propagation threshold.