Pulsating semi-waves in periodic media and spreading speed determined by a free boundary model (Q2347863)

The authors consider a free boundary problem for the diffusive logistic equation. This model describes the spreading of a new species over a radially symmetric heterogeneous \(n\)-dimensional habitat. The intrinsic growth rate of the species and its intra-specific competition are assumed to be radially symmetric and asymptotically space periodic near infinity. It is known that the spreading-vanishing dichotomy takes place for this model. The authors ``show that the asymptotic spreading speed of the free boundary problem coincides with the speed of the corresponding pulsating semi-wave'' when spreading happens. The existence of pulsating semi-waves in one-dimensional spatially periodic media is proved with the help of the fixed point theorem. Uniqueness up to the transformation in \(t\) of such pulsating semi-wave and continuous dependence of the parameters are also obtained.