Existence of traveling wave solutions for a nonlocal bistable equation: an abstract approach (Q847651)

The author investigates the following nonlocal analogue of bistable reaction-diffusion equations: \[ u_{t}=\mu* u-u+f(u), \tag{1} \] where \(\mu\) is a Borel measure on \(\mathbb R\), \(\mu(\mathbb R)=1\) and the nonlinearity \(f\) is Lipschitz continuous on \(\mathbb R\) and such that \(f(0)=f(1)=0,\) \(f<0\) on \((0,\alpha),\) \(f>0\) on \((\alpha,1)\) with a constant \(\alpha\in(0,1)\). It is shown that this equation has a traveling wave solution. The main result is the following: Theorem 1. Suppose the bistable nonlinearity \(f\in C^{1}(\mathbb R)\) satisfies \(f'(\alpha)>0\), where \(\alpha\) is the unique zero of \(f\) in \((0,1)\). Then, there exist a constant \(c\) and a monotone function \(\varphi\) on \(\mathbb R\) with \(\varphi(-\infty)=0\) and \(\varphi(+\infty)=1\) such that \(u(t,x):=\varphi(x+ct)\) is a solution to (1).