The trichotomy of solutions and the description of threshold solutions for periodic parabolic equations in cylinders (Q6142333)

The authors investigate the large time behavior of nonnegative bounded solutions for time periodic reaction-advection-diffusion equations in cylinders. The problem is assumed to be either bistable or multistable, but always admits a unique traveling wave connecting the two extremal steady states, say \(0\) and \(1\) up to normalization, with a positive speed. The main results deal with the trichotomy in the behavior of solutions associated with compactly supported initial data. A first result shows that that the solution converges to \(0\) (respectively \(1\)) for small (respectively large) initial data. It is unknown in general whether the intermediate case (where neither outcomes occur) is a sharp threshold or not, due to the possibility of the equation being of the multistable type. By sharp threshold, it would be meant here that it is never stable with respect to small perturbations in the choice of initial data. In a second result, under additional symmetry assumptions and using among other tools the method of moving hyperplanes, the authors show that the \(\omega\)-limit set of any threshold solution is symmetric with respect to the axis of the cylinder, and decays exponentially to \(0\) in both directions.