Global solutions near homogeneous steady states in a fully cross-diffusive predator-prey system with density-dependent motion (Q6062272)

The authors study the pursuit-evasion system \[ \begin{cases} u_t = \nabla \cdot (\phi_1(v) \nabla u - \chi_1(v) u \nabla v) + \mu_1 u(\lambda_1 - u + a_1 v), \\ v_t = \nabla \cdot (\phi_2(u) \nabla v + \chi_2(u) v \nabla u) + \mu_2 v(\lambda_2 - v - a_2 u) \end{cases} \] complemented with initial and homogeneous Neumann boundary conditions, in bounded domains \(\Omega \subset \mathbb R^n\), \(n \le 3\). The main result is that certain homogeneous steady states \((u_{\star}, v_{\star})\) (namely those with are stable steady states for the corresponding ODE system) are asymptotically stable with respect to cthe \(W^{2, 2}\) norm. The main part of the proof consists of showing that a certain linear combination of the \(L^2\) norms of \(u - u_\star\), \(v - v_\star\) and their first and second derivatives forms an energy functional as long as \(\|u - u_\star\|_{L^\infty}\) and \(\|v - v_\star\|_{L^\infty}\) are small. As in [\textit{M. Fuest}, SIAM J. Math. Anal. 52, No. 6, 5865--5891 (2020; Zbl 1458.35222)], which treats constant \(\phi_i, \chi_i > 0\) and which the article is apparently based on, a key point is that one can choose the parameters of the functional in such a way that the most worrisome terms cancel out each other. However, since \(\chi_1\) and \(\chi_2\) are only assumed to be nonnegative, the authors have to also deal with cases such as \(\chi_1(v_{\star}) = 0\), when such a cancellation is no longer possible. Instead, they can then make use of dissipative terms.