English

On the first bifurcation point for a free boundary problem modeling small arterial plaque

Analysis of PDEs 2020-11-04 v1

Abstract

Atherosclerosis occurs when plaque clogs the arteries. It is a leading cause of death in the United States and worldwide. In this paper, we study the bifurcation for a highly nonlinear and highly coupled PDE model of plaque formation in the early stage of atherosclerosis. The model involves LDL and HDL cholesterols, macrophage cells as well as foam cells, with the interface separating the plaque and blood flow region being a free boundary. We establish the first bifurcation point for the system corresponding to n=1n=1 mode. The symmetry-breaking stationary solution studied in this paper might be helpful in understanding why there exists arterial plaque that is often accumulated more on one side of the artery than the other.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.01528,
  title  = {On the first bifurcation point for a free boundary problem modeling small arterial plaque},
  author = {Xinyue Evelyn Zhao and Bei Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.01528},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.02407; author's note: this paper is a subsequent investigation of the bifurcation analysis based upon our previous paper (arXiv:2008.02407), it completed the proof of the first bifurcation point which has not been done in the previous paper

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:52:39.505Z