Convective stability of the critical waves of an FKPP growth process

Abstract

We construct the traveling wave solutions of an FKPP growth process of two densities of particles, and prove that the critical traveling waves are locally stable in a space where the perturbations can grow exponentially at the back of the wave. The considered reaction-diffusion system was introduced by Hannezo et al. in the context of branching morphogenesis (Cell, 171(1):242-255.e27, 2017): active, branching particles accumulate inactive particles, which do not react. Thus, the system features a continuum of steady state solutions, complicating the analysis. We adopt a result by Faye and Holzer (J.Diff.Eq., 269(9):6559-6601, 2020) for proving the stability of the critical traveling waves, by modifying the semi-group estimates to a space with unbounded weights. The novelty is that we use a Feynman-Kac formula to get an exponential a-priori estimate for the left tail of the PDE, in the regime where the weight is unbounded.