Nearly spherically symmetric expanding fronts in a bistable reaction-diffusion equation (Q5935822)

The author considers nearly spherically symmetric expanding fronts in the scalar bistable reaction-diffusion equation on \({\mathbb R}^N\). It is well known that, as \(t\rightarrow \infty\), then the front is more and more like a sphere under the rescaling of the radius to unity. In the paper, it is proved that, if the initial state is spherically symmetric and is approximated by a one-dimensional traveling wave with a sufficiently large radius, then the solution is approximated uniformly in \(t\geq 0\), without the rescaling of the radius, by the one-dimensional traveling wave with the speed \(V=c-(N-1)k\), where \(c> 0\) is the speed of the one-dimensional traveling wave solution and \(k\) is the mean curvature of the sphere. Moreover, it is shown that, if the initial state is a slightly perturbed spherical front, then the difference between the actual front and the expanding sphere hardly grows or decays for all \(t\geq 0\), although the relative magnitude of the perturbation to the radius of the sphere decreases to zero.