Spatial and dynamical chaos generated by reaction-diffusion systems in unbounded domains (Q2369889)

The author deals with nonlinear reaction-diffusion systems \[ u_t=a\Delta u-(L,\nabla)u-\lambda_0u-f(u)+g \qquad (\ast) \] satisfying homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions on an unbounded domain \(\Omega\subseteq{\mathbb R}^n\), with transport term \((L,\nabla)u\) for a given vector field \(L\). Under appropriate regularity and dissipativity conditions on the nonlinearity \(f\) (and \(g\)), it is shown that \((\ast)\) possesses a locally compact attractor \({\mathcal A}\). Upper and lower estimates for the Kolmogorov \(\varepsilon\)-entropy of this, usually infinite-dimensional, attractor are deduced. Moreover, a detailed study of the spatio-temporal chaos generated by spatially homogeneous reaction-diffusion systems in \(\Omega={\mathbb R}^n\) is given. This chaos is described using an extended \((n+1)\)-parameter semigroup on the attractor by \(1\)-parameter temporal dynamics and a \(n\)-parametric group of spatial shifts. Contrary to the case of purely temporal or spatial dynamics, for this extended semigroup a finite topological entropy is shown. In order to clarify the nature of the spatial and temporal chaos on \({\mathcal A}\), another model dynamical system is used, which is an adaption of Bernoulli shifts to the case of infinite entropy; homeomorphic embeddings of it into the spatial and temporal dynamics on \({\mathcal A}\) are constructed. Finally, as corollary of the obtained embeddings, it is shown that finite-dimensional dynamics can be realized (up to homeomorphism) by restricting the temporal dynamics to an appropriate invariant subset of \({\mathcal A}\).