Large time behavior of disturbed planar fronts in the Allen-Cahn equation (Q641021)

The authors study solutions to the Allen-Cahn equation \[ \partial_t u - \Delta u = f(u) \] in \(\mathbb R^n\) (with \(n\geq 2\)), where \(f\) is a bistable nonlinearity. They focus on stability of the planar wave which is a traveling wave solution \(\Phi\) to the Allen-Cahn equation. The objective is to study how a planar front behaves when arbitrarily large (but bounded) perturbation is given near the front region. Under suitable hypothesis, it is shown that \[ \lim_{t\to\infty} \sup_{(x,y)\in \mathbb R^{n-1}\times\mathbb R} | u(x,y,t) - \Phi(y - \gamma(x,t)) | =0, \] where \(\gamma(x,t)\) is a solution to the mean curvature flow equation describing the shape of the disturbed wave front. It is shown that the planar front is asymptotically stable in \(L^{\infty }(\mathbb R^n)\) under spatially ergodic perturbations, which include quasi-periodic and almost periodic ones as special cases. They furthermore present a general result, which states that, for a large class of evolution equations, the unique ergodicity of the initial data is inherited by the solution at any later time.