Critical travelling waves for general heterogeneous one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations (Q494140)

Heterogeneous reaction-diffusion equations are equations where the diffusion coefficients and the advection coefficients are functions of the spatial variables. They arise in mathematical models in a variety of scientific fields. For applied problems it is important to be able to identify coherent structures, such as, for example, traveling waves. Traveling waves are well defined for homogeneous equations, where their definition is naturally related to the translation property and the preservation of the shape. This definition is obviously not well suited for the heterogeneous equations. Thus, efforts are made to generalize the notion of waves to heterogeneous reaction-diffusion equations that would guarantee the existence of such wave-like structures in general formulation of heterogeneous reaction-diffusion equation and contain previously identified special solutions as special cases, for example pulsating fronts with minimal speed when the coefficients are periodic, or spatial transition waves for ignition-type nonlinearities. This paper presents a definition of critical travelling wave for a scalar heterogeneous reaction-diffusion equation posed on one-dimensional physical space as a time-global (weak) solution that roughly speaking is the ``steepest'' among other time-global (weak) solutions bounded by the same equilibrium states. The relation of critical travelling waves to previously known special solutions is investigated and their existence and uniqueness in general setting is proved. The advantages and limitations of the definition are clearly identified. The first section of this paper ``Previous notions of waves for reaction-diffusion equations'' is remarkable as it contains an excellent review of the results about various attempts to generalize the notion of waves to heterogeneous equations. The results from this paper are an important development in this direction.