English

Designing reaction-cross-diffusion systems with Turing and wave instabilities

Pattern Formation and Solitons 2025-08-26 v2

Abstract

General conditions are established under which reaction-cross-diffusion systems can undergo spatiotemporal pattern-forming instabilities. Recent work has focused on designing systems theoretically and experimentally to exhibit patterns with specific features, but the case of non-diagonal diffusion matrices has yet to be analysed. Here, a framework is presented for the design of general nn-component reaction-cross-diffusion systems that exhibit Turing and wave instabilities of a given wavelength. For a fixed set of reaction kinetics, it is shown how to choose diffusion matrices that produce each instability; conversely, for a given diffusion tensor, how to choose linearised kinetics. The theory is applied to several examples including a hyperbolic reaction-diffusion system, two different 3-component models, and a spatio-temporal version of the Ross-Macdonald model for the spread of malaria.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.06860,
  title  = {Designing reaction-cross-diffusion systems with Turing and wave instabilities},
  author = {Edgardo Villar-Sepúlveda and Alan R. Champneys and Andrew L. Krause},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.06860},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

49 pages, 14 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:40:29.559Z