On the Uniqueness of the Limiting Solution to a Strongly Coupled Singularly Perturbed Elliptic System ()
1. Introduction
In this paper, we consider the following strongly coupled system of elliptic equations:
(1.1)
where
denotes the density of the i-th population,
,
is the number of the species and
is a bounded domain in
with smooth boundary.
is the diffusion rate,
the intrinsic growth rate,
the intraspecific competition rate and
the interspecific competition rate,
represents the self-diffusion rate, and
represents the cross-diffusion rate,
are given Lipschitz continuous functions on
, which satisfy
and
for
. k is a free positive parameter, which is sufficiently large (or its limit at
).
System (1.1) represents a model of the steady state of m competing species with self- and cross-population pressures. In the case when
for every i and j, system (1.1) is the classic Lotka-Volterra competition model:
(1.2)
While if
for some
, the system becomes strongly coupled. System (1.1) (or its parabolic case) has been investigated by many workers [1] - [6], and various existing results have been developed. In particular, when
, Lou and Ni [2] characterized the existence of nonconstant positive solutions both for the small and large competition cases, while those in [4] [5] were concerned with the existence of positive solutions in relation to a pair of curves in the
-plane for both large and small cross-diffusion cases. For the existing results concerning the case when
, we refer to [6] and references therein.
According to Gause’s principle of competitive exclusion, two competing species cannot coexist under strong competition. The migration or the spatial distribution changes the situation and all the species survive but have disjoint habits, which is called spatial segregation [7]. To investigate such a phenomenon, we will focus on the so called strong competition regime, that is when the parameter k diverges to
, while the positive coefficients
remain fixed.
In the classic Lotka-Volterra competition model (1.2), it is proved that k-dependent solutions
of system (1.2) satisfy uniform bounds in Hölder norms and converge, up to a subsequence, to some limit
, having disjoint supports:
for
[8]. In the limiting configuration, the common zero set
can be considered as a free boundary (see for example [8] - [13]). When
for all i and j (symmetric interactions case), it is proved that the free boundary consists of two parts: a regular set, which is a
locally smooth hypersurface, and a singular set of Hausdorff dimension not greater than
; furthermore, in dimension 2, then free boundary consists in a locally finite collection of curves meeting with equal angles at a locally finite number of singular points, see for example [8] [9] [14]. Unlike the symmetric case, the asymmetric case (i.e. when
for some
) shows the emergence of spiraling nodal curves, still meeting at locally isolated points with finite vanishing order [15].
A further related problem is the study of the uniqueness and least energy property of the limiting configuration as
. In the case of three species and in dimension 2, Conti et al. [16] proved the uniqueness and least energy properties for the limiting state. That is, the solution of system (1.2) (when
) converges, as
, to the minimizer of a variational problem. In [13], Wang and Zhang generalized the result to arbitrary dimensions and arbitrary number of species. In [17], Arakelyan and Bozorgnia also proved the uniqueness of the limiting solution to system (2).
On the other hand, coming back to the strongly coupled system, Zhou et al. [18] [19] study the asymptotic behavior of solutions to system (1.1). They obtained the similar spatial segregation results and established the uniform
(
) bounds for solutions to system (1.1).
In this paper, we continue the study of system (1.1), we are concerned with the uniqueness of the limiting configuration of system (1.1). In order to simplify the notations, throughout the paper we assume
, for
. We only consider nonnegative solutions, that is, those
in its domain for all i. First we observe that, as proved in [19], the segregated limit
satisfies in distributional sense that
(1.3)
Define the singular space
Our result is as follows.
Theorem 1.1. Assume that
(1.4)
where
denotes the first eigenvalue of the operator
with zero Dirchlet boundary condition on
. Then there exists a unique vector
satisfying (1.3)
We note that Theorem 1.1 has already been proved in [19], where the uniqueness, also the least energy properties for the limiting state has been established. Their method originally stated in [13], is based on computing the derivative of the energy functional with respect to the geodesic homotopy between u and a comparison to an energy minimizing map v with same boundary values. Our proof is different from the one in [13] [19]. In fact, our method follows the mainstream of [17], based on the properties of limiting solutions and Maximum principle. Compared with the work of [19], we in fact give a new proof of the uniqueness of the limiting configuration. Our proof doesn’t require regular results of the free boundary. So in this sense, our proof is straightforward and simple.
Note that the study of strong-competition limits in corresponding elliptic or parabolic system is of interest not only for questions of spatial segregation in population, as here and in [20] [21], but also is key to the understanding of phase separation of Gross Pitaevskii systems of modeling Bose-Einstein condensates, see [22] - [27] and reference therein. Furthermore, the study on other aspects of segregation triggered by strong competition, starting from two pioneering papers by Dancer and Du in [20] [21], is now very vast; besides the papers quoted above, we mention [28] [29] [30] [31] for analogue studies in nonlocal contexts, [32] [33] for long-range interaction models.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In section 2, we introduce a transformation and recall some preliminary results, which are essential to the proof of the main results. In Section 3, we prove the uniqueness of the system (1.1) in the limiting case as k tends to infinity.
2. Some Preliminary Results
In this section, we mention some known results for the solutions of system (1.1), which play an important role in our study. To begin with, for every index i, we define
(2.1)
Then the Jacobian determinant
So there exist inverse functions
for
, which are continuous and have continuous partial derivatives.
To simplify the notations we denote by
and using (2.1) we may write system (1.1) in the following equivalent form:
(2.2)
Now we recall some estimates and compactness properties of solutions to system (1.1).
Lemma 2.1 ( [19]) Let
be a nonnegative solution of (1.1) for some
, and
be defined as in (2.1). Then
is a nonnegative solution of (2.2), and for every
, there exists a constant
independent of k such that
Moreover, there exists
such that for all
,
1) up to subsequences,
in
;
2) if we define for each index i:
(2.3)
then up to subsequences,
in
;
3)
and
in
, for
. Furthermore, in distributional sense,
satisfies
(2.4)
where
(2.5)
Remark 2.1. By (2.4) and Theorem 8.2 in [14], we have that each element of
is actually global Lipschitz continuous on
.
3. Uniqueness of the Limiting Configuration
In this section, we prove Theorem 1.1. We perform a change of variable in order to deal with the problem in a different setting. Let
and
be as the statement in Section 2. Assume that (1.4) holds. We define
(3.1)
with
be given in (2.5). It is obvious that for each i,
is Lipschitz continuous and
, so (3.1) is well defined. By assumption (1.4), we have
, and, this implies the existence of a positive function
such that
(3.2)
Indeed, the monotonicity of the first eigenvalue of the Dirichlet problem with respect to the domain implies that there exists
such that
. Let
be the corresponding eigenfunction of the operator
with zero Dirchlet boundary condition on
. Then
in
, and by the elliptic regularity theory
. So if we let
be the restriction of
to
, then
(note that
is regular) and satisfies (3.2). In particular, there exists a constant
such that
for all
. We now define
(3.3)
then
if and only if
. By Remark 2.1, for every index i,
is Lipschitz continuous and, by Lemma 2.1,
satisfies in distributional sense that
(3.4)
By the definition of
, we have
for
. In this setting, we consider the corresponding singular space
By above construction, we know that if there exists a unique vector
satisfying (3.4), the uniqueness for the original system (1.3) then follows by the definition of the change of the variables, and the proof of Theorem 1.1 is complete. In the following, we focus on the analysis of system (3.4). To begin with, for every index i, we denote
(3.5)
Lemma 3.1. Let two elements
and
belong to
and satisfying (3.4). Then the following equation for each
holds:
Proof We argue by contradiction. Let there exists some
such that
(3.6)
Assume
, then in
we have
(3.7)
We claim that:
In fact, by (3.7)
(3.8)
Since
is Lipschitz continuous and
, by the definition of
(see (3.1)) we have
Similarly
and the claim follows. We can now use the weak maximum principle to conclude that
which contradicts (3.6). Then we can interchange the role of
and
. Thus, we also have
for all
, and we complete the proof of Lemma 3.1.
In view of Lemma 3.1 we define the following quantities
Lemma 3.2. Let two elements
and
belong to
and satisfying (3.4). We set P and Q as defined above. If
is attained for some index
, then we have
. Moveover, there exist another index
and a point
, such that:
Proof Let the maximum
be attained for the
component. According to the previous lemma, we know that
attains its maximum on the set
. Let that maximum point be
. So, if
, then we have
Indeed, if
, then in the light of disjointness property of the components of
and
we get
which is a contradiction. If
, then again due to the disjointness of the densities
,
, we have
This again leads to a contradiction. Therefore
.
Now assume by contradiction that
. Then by definition of Q we should have
This apparently yields
If
, then
, obtaining a contradiction.
Let
, then we have
This contradiction implies that
. By analogous proof, one can see that if P be non-positive then Q will be non-positive as well. Next, assume the maximum P is attained at a point
. Then we get
This shows that
Since
, then there exists
such that
. This implies
The same argument shows that
which yields
. Hence, we can write
This gives us
, and therefore
which completes the last statement of the proof.
We are ready to the proof of Theorem 1.1. As already mentioned, it is sufficient to prove the following unique result for system (4).
Theorem 3.1. There exists a unique vector
, which satisfies system (3.4).
Proof Let
and
be two m-tuples of the limiting solutions of system (1.1) as
. Then we define
It is now clear that
and
are belong to the class
and satisfy (3.4). For them, we set P and Q as above. Then, we consider two cases
and
. If we assume that
then Lemma 3.2 implies that
. This leads to
for every
, and
. This provides that
which in turn implies that
Now, suppose
, we show that this case leads to a contradiction. Let the value P is attained for some
, then due to Lemma 3.2 there exist
and
such that:
Let
be a fixed curve starting at
and ending on the boundary of
. Since
is connected, then one can always choose such a curve belonging to
. By the disjointness and smoothness of
and
, there exists a ball centered at
, and with radius
(
depends on
) which we denote it
, such that
This yields
The maximum principle implies that
On the other hand, in view of Lemma 3.2 we have
which implies that P is attained at the interior point
. Thus,
Next let
. We get
, which leads to
. We proceed as follows: If
, then as above
This in turn implies
Again following the maximum principle and recalling that
we conclude that
If
, then clearly the only possibility is
. Thus
Following the lines of the proof of Lemma 3.2, we find some
, such that
It is easy to see that there exists a ball
(without loss of generality one keeps the same notation)
In view of the maximum principle and above steps we obtain:
Then we take
such that
stands between the points
and
along the given curve
. According to the previous arguments for the point
we will find an index
and corresponding ball
, such that
We continue this way and obtain a sequence of points
along the curve
, which are getting closer to the boundary of
. Since for all
and
we have
then obviously after finite steps N we find the point
, which will be very close to the
and for all
On the other hand, according to our construction for the point
, there exists an index
such that
which is a contradiction. This completes the proof of the uniqueness.
4. Conclusions and Further Works
The study of the asymptotic behavior of singular perturbed equations and systems of elliptic or parabolic type is very broad and subject of research. In this paper, we study a strongly coupled elliptic system arising in competing models in population dynamics. We give an alternative proof of the uniqueness of the limiting configuration as
under suitable conditions. We remark that the approach here is different from the one in [19]. Our proof doesn’t require regular results of the free boundary. So in this sense, our proof is straightforward and simple.
Finally, we mention that there are many interesting problems for further study. Note that we prove the uniqueness of the limiting solutions to a strongly coupled elliptic system, naturally to ask whether this result can be extended to the corresponding parabolic system? Up to our knowledge, the uniform Hölder bounds for parabolic setting is unknown, and both the asymptotics and the qualitative properties of the limit segregated profiles remain a challenge, this will be the object of a forthcoming paper.
Founding
The work is partially supported by PRC grant NSFC 11601224.