Center for                           Nonlinear Analysis CNA Home People Seminars Publications Workshops and Conferences CNA Working Groups CNA Comments Form Summer Schools Summer Undergraduate Institute PIRE Cooperation Graduate Topics Courses SIAM Chapter Seminar Positions Contact CNA Seminar/Colloquium/Joint Pitt-CNA Colloquium Mohammad El Smaily Carnegie Melllon University Title: KPP Traveling fronts within large drift Abstract: This talk is based on a joint work with Stephane Kirsch. Pulsating traveling fronts are solutions of heterogeneous reaction-advection-diffusion equations that model some population dynamics. Fixing a unitary direction e, it is a well-known fact that for nonlinearities of KPP type (after Kolmogorov, Petrovsky and Piskunov, f(u)=u(1-u) is a typical homogeneous KPP nonlinearity), there exists a minimal speed c* such that a pulsating traveling front with a speed c in the direction of e exists if and only if c >= c*. In a periodic heterogeneous framework we have the formula of Berestycki, Hamel and Nadirashvili (2005) for the minimal speed of propagation. This formula involves elliptic eigenvalue problems whose coefficients are expressed in terms of the geometry of the domain, the direction of propagation, and the coefficients of reaction, diffusion and advection of our equation. In this talk, I will describe the asymptotic behaviors of the minimal speed of propagation within either a large drift, a mixture of large drift and small reaction, or a mixture of large drift and large diffusion. These large drift limits' are expressed as maxima of certain variational quantities over the family of first integrals' of the advection field. I will give more details about the limit and a necessary and sufficient condition for which the limit is equal to zero in the 2-d case.Date: Thursday, October 21, 2010Time: 1:30 pmLocation: Wean Hall 8220Submitted by:  David Kinderlehrer