Spectral stability of traveling fronts for reaction diffusion-degenerate Fisher-KPP equations

Abstract: This paper establishes the spectral stability in exponentially weighted spaces of smooth traveling monotone fronts for reaction diffusion equations of Fisher-KPP type with nonlinear degenerate diffusion coefficient. It is assumed that the former is degenerate, that is, it vanishes at zero, which is one of the equilibrium points of the reaction. A parabolic regularization technique is introduced in order to locate a subset of the compression spectrum of the linearized operator around the wave, whereas the point spectrum is proved to be stable with the use of energy estimates. Detailed asymptotic decay estimates of solutions to spectral equations are required in order to close the energy estimates. It is shown that all fronts traveling with speed above a threshold value are spectrally stable in an appropriately chosen exponentially weighted $L^2$-space.