A Floer homology approach to travelling waves in reaction-diffusion equations on cylinders

Abstract

We develop a new homological invariant for the dynamics of the bounded solutions to the travelling wave PDE \[ \left\{ \begin{array}{l l} \partial_t^2 u - c \partial_t u + \Delta u + f(x,u) = 0 \qquad & t \in \mathbf{R},\; x \in \Omega, \newline B(u) = 0 & t \in \mathbf{R},\; x \in \partial \Omega, \end{array} \right. \] where $c \neq 0$, $\Omega \subset \mathbf{R}^d$ is a bounded domain, $\Delta$ is the Laplacian on $\Omega$, and $B$ denotes Dirichlet, Neumann, or periodic boundary data. Restrictions on the nonlinearity $f$ are kept to a minimum, for instance, any nonlinearity exhibiting polynomial growth in $u$ can be considered. In particular, the set of bounded solutions of the travelling wave PDE may not be uniformly bounded. Despite this, the homology is invariant under lower order (but not necessarily small) perturbations of the nonlinearity $f$, thus making the homology amenable for computation. Using the new invariant we derive lower bounds on the number of bounded solutions to the travelling wave PDE.