Quenching of Reaction by Cellular Flows

Abstract

We consider a reaction-diffusion equation in a cellular flow. We prove that in the strong flow regime there are two possible scenario for the initial data that is compactly supported and the size of the support is large enough. If the flow cells are large compared to the reaction length scale, propagating fronts will always form. For the small cell size, any finitely supported initial data will be quenched by a sufficiently strong flow. We estimate that the flow amplitude required to quench the initial data of support $L_0$ is $A>CL_0^4\ln(L_0)$. The essence of the problem is the question about the decay of the $L^\infty$ norm of a solution to the advection-diffusion equation, and the relation between this rate of decay and the properties of the Hamiltonian system generated by the two-dimensional incompressible fluid flow.