Acceleration of propagation in a chemotaxis-growth system with slowly decaying initial data

Abstract

In this paper, we study the spatial propagation dynamics of a parabolic–elliptic chemotaxis system with logistic source which reduces to the well-known Fisher-KPP equation without chemotaxis. It is known that for fast decaying initial functions, this system has a finite spreading speed. For slowly decaying initial functions, we show that the accelerating propagation will occur and chemotaxis does not affect the propagation mode determined by slowly decaying initial functions if the logistic damping is strong, that is, the system has the same upper and lower bounds of the accelerating propagation as for the classical Fisher-KPP equation. The main new idea of proving our results is the construction of auxiliary equations to overcome the lack of comparison principle due to chemotaxis.