Blow-up versus global existence of solutions for reaction-diffusion equations on classes of Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

It is well known from the work of [2] that the Fujita phenomenon for reaction-diffusion evolution equations with power nonlinearities does not occur on the hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^N$, thus marking a striking difference with the Euclidean situation. We show that, on classes of manifolds in which the bottom $\Lambda$ of the $L^2$ spectrum of $-\Delta$ is strictly positive (the hyperbolic space being thus included), a different version of the Fujita phenomenon occurs for other kinds of nonlinearities, in which the role of the critical Fujita exponent in the Euclidean case is taken by $\Lambda$. Such nonlinearities are time-independent, in contrast to the ones studied in [2]. As a consequence of our results we show that, on a class of manifolds much larger than the case $M=\mathbb{H}^N$ considered in [2], solutions to (1.1) with power nonlinearity $f(u)=u^p$, $p>1$, and corresponding to sufficiently small data, are global in time.