Special Session 15: 

Dispersal towards food: the singular limit of an Allen-Cahn equation

Danielle Hilhorst
CNRS/Univ. Paris-Sud
France
Co-Author(s):    Yongjung KIM, Dohyun KWON, Thanh Nam NGUYEN
Abstract:
The effect of dispersal under heterogeneous environment is studied in terms of the singular limit of an Allen-Cahn equation. Since biological organisms often slow down their dispersal if food is abundant, a food metric diffusion is taken to include such a phenomenon. The migration effect of the problem is approximated by a mean curvature flow after taking the singular limit which now includes an advection term produced by the spatial heterogeneity of food distribution. It is shown that the interface moves towards a local maximum of the food distribution. In other words, the dispersal considered here is not a trivialization process anymore, but an aggregation one towards food.