Attractors for reaction-diffusion equations on arbitrary unbounded domains (Q933131)

The authors investigate the asymptotic behavior of the parabolic equation defined on an arbitrary unbounded domain \(\Omega\) in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) \[ \frac {\partial u}{\partial t}+ \beta(x)u- \sum_{i,j} \partial_i(a_{ij}(x)\partial_ju) =f(x,u), \] where \(\beta: \Omega \to \mathbb{R}\) and \(f: \Omega \times \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}\) are given functions, and \(Lu= \sum_{i,j} \partial_i (a_{ij} (x) \partial_j u)\) is a linear second-order differential operator in divergence form. Under smoothness assumptions on the function \(a_{ij}\) and the domain \(\Omega\), the existence of global attractors for the parabolic equation defined on both bounded and unbounded domains has been obtained in the literature. In the present paper, the authors remove these smoothness assumptions and extend the existence of global attractors to a more general parabolic equation. Actually, without any smoothness conditions on \(\partial \Omega\) and \(a_{ij}\), the authors prove the existence of a global attractor for the above parabolic equation when the nonlinearity \(f\) is subcritical. The asymptotic compactness of the equation on unbounded domains is obtained by uniform estimates on the tails of solutions.