Spatial asymptotics and equilibria of heat flow on $\mathbb{R}^d$

We prove that the heat equation on $\mathbb{R}^d$ is well-posed in certain spaces of functions allowing spatial asymptotic expansions as $|x|\to\infty$ of any a priori given order. In fact, we show that the Laplacian on such function spaces generates an analytic semigroup of angle $\pi/2$ with polynomial growth as $t\to\infty$. Generically, a large class of nonlinear heat flows have equilibrium solutions with spatial asymptotics of the considered type. We provide a simple nonlinear model that features global in time existence with such asymptotics at spatial infinity.