The existence of dendritic fronts (Q5903475)

The paper under review deals with a fourth-order semilinear parabolic equation in one space variable x (x\(\in {\mathbb{R}})\), and focusses on fronts which are asymptotic to a stationary solution: roughly speaking, they consist of a trailing edge moving (relative to a fixed reference frame) with a certain speed, leaving behind a pattern which does not move: indeed, such solutions have the property that their Fourier components (relative to the space variable) approach, when the moving coordinate variable goes to \(+\infty\) (respectively, to -\(\infty)\), the zero solution (respectively, the Fourier components of a stationary solution). The authors establish existence and uniqueness (modulo translation and the choice of a phase) of a front asymptotic to a stationary solution, within a certain range of parameter values. Herein, the presence of a small parameter plays an important role. The problem is interesting, because it provides a rather new mechanism for pattern formation, under circumstances which are physically very appealing; at the same time, it is a hard and challenging problem, mainly because of the fourth order character of the equation and of the lack of viable comparison techniques for the equation itself. Nevertheless, the authors succeed circumventing such difficulties, by developing an amount of sophisticated devices which reveal a deep knowledge of disparate fields, such as stable manifold theory, perturbation techniques, detailed spectral analysis, estimates on weighted spaces of continuous functions, improved bounds for second-order boundary value problems.