Spectral stability of modulated travelling waves bifurcating near essential instabilities

Abstract

Localized travelling waves to reaction-diffusion systems on the real line are investigated. The issue addressed in this work is the transition to instability which arises when the essential spectrum crosses the imaginary-axis. In the first part of this work, it has been shown that large modulated pulses bifurcate near the onset of instability; they are a superposition of the primary pulse with spatially periodic Turing patterns of small amplitude. The bifurcating modulated pulses can be parametrized by the wavelength of the Turing patterns. Furthermore, they are time periodic in a moving frame. In the second part, spectral stability of the bifurcating modulated pulses is addressed. It is shown that the modulated pulses are spectrally stable if and only if the small Turing patterns are spectrally stable, that is, if their continuous spectrum only touches the imaginary-axis at zero. This requires an investigation of the period map associated with the time-periodic modulated pulses.