Does strong repulsion lead to smooth solutions in a repulsion-attraction chemotaxis system even when starting with highly irregular initial data?

Abstract

It has been well established that, in attraction-repulsion Keller-Segel systems of the form\begin{equation*} \left\{ \begin{aligned} u_t &= \Delta u - \chi \nabla \cdot (u\nabla v) + \xi \nabla \cdot (u\nabla w), \\ \tau v_t &= \Delta v + \alpha u - \beta v,\\ \tau w_t &= \Delta w + \gamma u - \delta w \end{aligned} \right. \end{equation*} in a smooth bounded domain $\Omega \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$, $n\in\mathbb{N}$, with Neumann boundary conditions and parameters $\chi, \xi \geq 0$, $\alpha,\beta,\gamma,\delta > 0$ and $\tau \in \{0,1\}$, finite-time blow-up can be ruled out in many scenarios given sufficiently smooth initial data if the repulsive chemotaxis is sufficiently stronger than its attractive counterpart. In this paper, we will go - in a sense - a step further than this by studying the same system with initial data that could already be understood as being in a blown-up state (e.g. a positive Radon measure for the first solution component) and then ask the question whether sufficiently strong repulsion has enough of a regularizing effect to lead to the existence of a smooth solution, which is still connected to said initial data in a sensible fashion. Regarding this, we in fact establish that the construction of such a solution is possible in the two-dimensional parabolic-parabolic system and the two- and three-dimensional parabolic-elliptic system under appropriate assumptions on the interaction of repulsion and attraction as well as the initial data.