Bifurcation analysis for a free boundary problem modeling tumor growth (Q636747)

This paper deals with a free boundary problem modeling the growth of nonnecrotic tumors. The paper under review is concerned with the non-symmetric setting, which corresponds to the case where the tumor domain is arbitrary, and looks for nontrivial steady-states of the model. One of the main results in this paper establishes that if the rate of mitosis relative to the relaxation mechanism is large, then the circular equilibrium is unstable, which also suggests existence of nontrivial stationary solutions. When studying the set of equilibria, the authors deal with a free boundary problem which is reduced to an operator equation between certain subspaces of the small Hölder spaces over the unit circle. Next, by means of the theorem on bifurcations from simple eigenvalues, the authors obtain infinitely many bifurcation branches consisting only of stationary solutions of the considered model.