Convergence of boundary layers of chemotaxis models with physical boundary conditions I: degenerate initial data

Abstract

The celebrated experiment of Tuval et al. \cite{tuval2005bacterial} showed that the bacteria living a water drop can form a thin layer near the air-water interface, where a so-called chemotaxis-fluid system with physical boundary conditions was proposed to interpret the mechanism underlying the pattern formation alongside numerical simulations. However, the rigorous proof for the existence and convergence of the boundary layer solutions to the proposed model still remains open. This paper shows that the model with physical boundary conditions proposed in \cite{tuval2005bacterial} in one dimension can generate boundary layer solution as the oxygen diffusion rate $\varepsilon>0$ is small. Specifically, we show that the solution of the model with $\varepsilon>0$ will converge to the solution with $\varepsilon=0$ (outer-layer solution) plus the boundary layer profiles (inner-layer solution) with a sharp transition near the boundary as $ \varepsilon \rightarrow 0$. There are two major difficulties in our analysis. First, the global well-posedness of the model is hard to prove since the Dirichlet boundary condition can not contribute to the gradient estimates needed for the cross-diffusion structure in the model. Resorting to the technique of taking anti-derivative, we remove the cross-diffusion structure such that the Dirichlet boundary condition can facilitate the needed estimates. Second, the outer-layer profile of bacterial density is required to be degenerate at the boundary as $ t \rightarrow 0 ^{+}$, which makes the traditional cancellation technique incapable. Here we employ the Hardy inequality and delicate weighted energy estimates to overcome this obstacle and derive the requisite uniform-in-$\varepsilon$ estimates allowing us to pass the limit $\varepsilon \to 0$ to achieve our results.