Front propagation close to the onset of instability

Abstract

We describe the resulting spatiotemporal dynamics when a homogeneous equilibrium loses stability in a spatially extended system. More precisely, we consider reaction-diffusion systems, assuming only that the reaction kinetics undergo a transcritical, saddle-node, or supercritical pitchfork bifurcation as a parameter passes through zero. We construct traveling front solutions which describe the invasion of the now-unstable state by a nearby stable state. We show that these fronts are marginally spectrally stable near the bifurcation point, which, together with recent advances in the theory of front propagation into unstable states, establishes that these fronts govern the dynamics of localized perturbation to the unstable state. Our proofs are based on functional analytic tools to study the existence and eigenvalue problems for fronts, which become singularly perturbed after a natural rescaling.