We study the stability and oscillation of traveling fronts in a three-component, advection-reaction biodegradation model. The three components are pollutant, nutrient, and bacteria concentrations. Under an explicit condition on the biomass growth and decay coefficients, we derive reduced, two-component, semilinear hyperbolic models through a relaxation procedure, during which biomass is slaved to pollutant and nutrient concentration variables. The reduced two-component models resemble the Broadwell model of the discrete velocity gas. The traveling fronts of the reduced system are explicit and are expressed in terms of hyperbolic tangent function in the nutrient-deficient regime. We perform energy estimates to prove the asymptotic stability of these fronts under explicit conditions on the coefficients in the system. In the small damping limit, we carry out Wentzel--Kramers--Brillouin (WKB) analysis on front

We revisit the periodic homogenization of Dirichlet problems for the Laplace operator in perforated domains and establish a unified proof that works for different regimes of hole-cell ratios, which is the ratio between the scaling factor of the holes and that of the periodic cells. The approach is then made quantitative and yields correctors and error estimates for vanishing hole-cell ratios. For a positive volume fraction of holes, the approach is just the standard oscillating test function method; for a vanishing volume fraction of holes, we study asymptotic behaviors of properly rescaled cell problems and use them to build oscillating test functions. Our method reveals how the different regimes are intrinsically connected through the cell problems and the connection with periodic layer potentials.

We establish a new on-diagonal lower estimate of continuous-time heat kernels for large time on graphs. To achieve the goal, we first introduce an upper estimate of heat kernels in natural graph metric, then use the upper estimate and the volume growth condition to show the validity of the on-diagonal lower estimate.

We study a Maxwell-Bloch system describing the dynamics of single-longitudinal Raman lasers in the two transverse space dimensions. Raman lasing is generated by a coherent external pump laser, as a three-wave interaction involving two optical and one material wave. On the other hand, a two-level laser involves incoherent external pumping through, for example, an electrical discharge or flashlamp. Raman lasers have the advantage of being tunable and display a novel explicit nonlinear detuning between the pump and laser emission frequencies. Consequently these lasers exhibit much richer nonlinear dynamics. We establish the global existence of classical solutions, and show that for periodic domains the dynamics is governed by a global smooth attractor of finite dimensions. We explain the structures of nonlinear interactions and couplings that lead to the time asymptotic smoothing. We also construct

Let G=(V,E) be a connected finite graph and Δ be the usual graph Laplacian. Using the calculus of variations and a method of upper and lower solutions, we give various conditions such that the Kazdan–Warner equation Δu=c−he^u has a solution on V, where c is a constant, and h:V→R is a function. We also consider similar equations involving higher order derivatives on graph. Our results can be compared with the original manifold case of Kazdan and Warner (Ann. Math. 99(1):14–47, 1974).