Analysis of stationary droplets in a generic Turing reaction-diffusion system

Abstract

Solitonlike structures called “droplets” are found to exist within a paradigm reaction-diffusion model that can be used to describe patterning in a number of biological systems, for example, on the skin of various fish species. They have also been found in many other systems that can be modeled with a complex Ginzburg-Landau system. These droplets can be analyzed in the biological paradigm model because the system has two nonzero stable steady states that are symmetric; however, the asymmetric case is more challenging. We first review the properties of the paradigm system and then extend a recently developed perturbation technique [D. Gomila et al., J. Opt. B: Quantum Semiclassical Opt. 6, S265 (2004)] to investigate the weakly asymmetric case. We compare the results of our mathematical analysis with numerical simulations and show good agreement in the region where the assumptions hold.