Hopf Bifurcation with the Spatial Average of an Activator in a Radially Symmetric Free Boundary Problem.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2010, Article ID 529869, 18 pages doi:10.1155/2010/529869 Research Article Hopf Bifurcation with the Spatial Average of an Activator in a Radially Symmetric Free Boundary Problem YoonMee Ham Department of Mathematics, Kyonggi University, Suwon 443-760, Republic of Korea Correspondence should be addressed to YoonMee Ham, ymham@kyonggi.ac.kr Received 5 August 2010; Accepted 21 October 2010 Academic Editor: Oded Gottlieb Copyright q 2010 YoonMee Ham. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. An interface problem derived by a bistable reaction-diffusion system with the spatial average of an activator is studied on an n-dimensional ball. We analyze the existence of the radially symmetric solutions and the occurrence of Hopf bifurcation as a parameter varies in two and three- dimensional spaces. 1. Introduction The study of interfacial patterns is important in several areas of biology, chemistry, physics, and other fields 1–4. Internal layers or free boundary, which separate two stable bulk states by a sharp transition near interfaces, are often observed in bistable reaction-diffusion equations when the reaction rate is faster than the diffusion effect. We consider a reaction- diffusion system with a sufficiently small positive constant ε 5, 6 2 2 σεu ε ∇ u f u, v , t 2 v D∇ v g u, v t 0, x ∈ Ω,