Stability of gasless combustion fronts in one-dimensional solids (Q717191)

In this paper the authors consider the system of equations describing the gasless combustion in a one-dimensional solid. They show a type of nonlinear stability of the physical combustion front if a perturbation of the front is small in both a spatially-uniform and an exponentially-weighted norm. The perturbation stays small in the spatially uniform norm and decays in the exponentially weighted norm, provided the linearized operator has no eigenvalues in the right-hand-plane other than zero. Applying the Evans function and a simple change of variables they show that the zero eigenvalue must be simple. The analyses are complicated because: (i) the linearized operator is not sectorial, (ii) the linearized operator has good spectral properties only in the case when the weighted norm is used, but then the nonlinear term is not Lipschitz. In order to prove it, they first show that when the weighted norm is used, the semigroup generated by the linearized operator decays on a subspace complementary to the operator kernel. Next, they prove that the semigroup generated by the linearized operator is a compact perturbation of the semigroup generated by a triangular operator. Using the two results they prove that the solutions of the considered system become small in the sense of spatially uniform norm. The approach described above allows to prove nonlinear stability of the solution in the weighted norm.