Sharp Interface Dynamics in a Minimal Non-Reciprocal Cahn-Hilliard System

Abstract: Interest in non-reciprocally coupled systems recently led to the introduction of a minimal non-reciprocally coupled Cahn-Hilliard (CH) model by Brauns and Marchetti in 2024 arXiv:2306.08868, which we refer to as the Brauns-Marchetti (BM) model. This model can be seen as a conservative counterpart to the spatially extended FitzHugh-Nagumo model. Lacking a gradient structure, the BM model was observed to exhibit interesting dynamics including traveling periodic wave-trains and other coherent structures, as well as spatiotemporal chaos in certain parameter regimes. In this paper, we derive an effective equation for the interface dynamics of solutions to the BM model in $\mathbb{R}^2$ in the sharp-interface limit. The resulting system of equations is a generalization of the classical Mullins-Sekerka (MS) equations, which we refer to as the modified MS equations. We show that the modified MS equation shares some properties with its classical counterpart, but importantly, it is not in general a length minimizing flow. To illustrate the utility of this asymptotic reduction in the sharp interface limit, we perform a detailed analysis of stationary and periodic wave-trains, systematically deriving expressions for wave-train speeds and stability thresholds. The methods used here should be applicable to other non-reciprocally coupled CH models and therefore provide another avenue for their more detailed analysis.