Multiple spreading phenomena for a free boundary problem of a reaction-diffusion equation with a certain class of bistable nonlinearity (Q272265)

This paper considers a free boundary problem for the diffusion equation, which describes the spreading of an invasive or new species in a population model. The authors investigate the long time behavior of a global solution to this problem. It is demonstrated that in the case of positive bistable nonlinearity in the equation, the asymptotic behaviors of the global solution can be classified into the folloving types: vanishing, small spreading, big spreading, and transition. Some suffisient conditions for each type of asymptotic behavior are obtained. Finally, when the free boundary expands to infinity, lower bounds and upper bounds for the asymptotic spreading speed are derived by studying the semi-wave problem.