Characterization of Turing diffusion-driven instability on evolving domains (Q447951)

This paper studies systems of reaction-diffusion equations on domains which are evolving in time. The motivation for this comes from biological models of morphogenesis, in which the phenomenon of Turing instability explains formation of patterns. A growing domain models the growth of an organism, and a periodically-changing domain is relevant for models of cardiac activity. The authors develop a general framework for studying reaction-systems on evolving domains, where a central tool is the use of a time-dependent diffeomorphism to reduce the problem to nonautonomous equations on a fixed domain. Criteria for the occurence of a Turing instability are obtained for the case in which the evolving domain has a limiting shape for large time, and for the case in which the evolution of the domain is asymptotically periodic, in terms of the linearization of the limiting problems around the space-homogeneous solutions. Applications to the special case of the Gierer-Meinhardt activator-inhibitor model are given.