Spreading speeds and traveling waves for abstract monostable evolution systems (Q984403)

The authors develop the theory of spreading speeds and travelling waves for abstract monostable evolution systems with spatial structure. They establish the theory of asymptotic speeds of spread and monostable traveling waves for discrete and continuous-time monotone semiflows on a closed subset of \(C({\mathcal H},X) \), where \({\mathcal H}=\mathbb R\) or \(\mathbb Z\). After an introduction, Section 2 is dedicated to some notation, hypothesis and some preliminary results on the abstract setting and the Kuratowski measure of noncompacteness. In Section 3, the authors show the existence of the rightward and leftward spreading speeds for both discreet and continuous-time monotone semiflows. Section 4 establishes the existence of monotone rightward and leftward traveling waves with speeds above the spreading speeds and the nonexistence of traveling waves with speeds below the spreading speeds. They also give a conditional \(\alpha\)-contraction assumption so that the theory can be applied to time-delayed evolution equations. In Section 5, the authors use the abstract theory to obtain the spreading speeds and periodic traveling waves for monotone semiflows in a periodic habitat, which represents a generalization of the theory developed by Weinberger (2002) for order-preserving compact operators on the space of continuous and uniformly bounded functions defined on \(\mathbb R^n\). Section 6 is devoted to the study of a parabolic equation in a periodic cylinder under the Dirichlet boundary condition. By the linear equation approach, the authors obtain the formulae for spreading speeds, and then, they show the both rightward and leftward spreading speeds are identical even if the reaction term and the cylinder and not reflectively invariant for variable \(x\). In Section 7, the authors give further applications of the abstract theory to a reaction-diffusion model with a quiescent stage, a porous medium equation in a tube, and a lattice system in a periodic habitat.