A priori estimates of stationary solutions of an activator-inhibitor system.pdfVIP

a r X i v : m a t h / 0 6 1 0 7 6 5 v 1 [ m a t h .A P ] 2 5 O c t 2 0 0 6 A PRIORI ESTIMATES OF STATIONARY SOLUTIONS OF AN ACTIVATOR-INHIBITOR SYSTEM HUIQIANG JIANG AND WEI-MING NI Abstract. We consider positive solutions of the stationary Gierer-Meinhardt system ??? ?? d1△u? u+ u p vq + σ = 0 in ?, d2△v ? v + u r vs = 0 in ?, ?u ?ν = ?v ?ν = 0 on ?? where △ is the Laplace operator, ? is a bounded smooth domain in Rn, n ≥ 1 and ν is the unit outer normal to ??. Under suitable conditions on the exponents p, q, r and s, different types of a priori estimates are obtained, existence and non-existence results of nontrivial solutions are derived, for both σ 0 and σ = 0 cases. 1. Introduction In 1972, following an ingenious idea of A. Turing [13], A. Gierer and H. Mein- hardt [2] proposed a mathematical model for pattern formations of spatial tissue structures of hydra in morphogenesis, a biological phenomenon discovered by A. Trembley in 1744 [12]. It is a system of reaction-diffusion equations of the form (1.1) ?? ? ut = d1△u? u+ upvq + σ in ?× [0, T ) , τvt = d2△v ? v + urvs in ?× [0, T ) , ?u ?ν = ?v ?ν = 0 on ??× [0, T ) where△ is the Laplace operator, ? is a bounded smooth domain in Rn, n ≥ 1 and ν is the unit outer normal to ??. Here u, v represent respectively the concentrations of two substances, activator and inhibitor, with diffusion rates d1, d2, and are therefore always assumed to be positive throughout this paper. The source term σ is a nonnegative constant representing the production of the activator, τ 0 is the response rate of v to the change of u, and the exponents p, q, r, s are nonnegative numbers satisfying the condition (1.2) 0 p? 1 r q s+ 1 . We remark that the response rate τ was introduced mathematically and is an important parameter on the stability of the system. The idea behind (1.1) is the celebrated diffusion-driven instability, originally due to A. Turing [13], which asserts that different diffusion rates could lead to nonho- mog