A delayed reaction-diffusion system with free boundaries is investigated in this paper to understand how the bacteria spread spatially to larger area from the initial infected habitat. Under the assumptions that the nonlinearities are of monostable type and the initial values satisfy some compatible condition, we show that the free boundary problem is well-posed and discuss the long-time behaviour of solution (including spreading and vanishing) in terms of the spatial-temporal risk index. Furthermore, to determine the spreading speed of free boundaries when spreading occurs, we first study the distribution of roots of a transcendental equation containing a polynomial of degree four and then establish the existence and uniqueness of monotone solution to a delay-induced nonlocal semi-wave problem by employing the approximation method, lower-upper solutions technique and Schauder fixed point theorem. It is shown that time delays slow down the spreading of bacteria.

The present paper deals with the kinetic-theoretic description of the evolution of systems consisting of many particles interacting not only with each other but also with the external world, so that the equation governing their evolution contains an additional term representing such interaction, called the ‘forcing term’. Firstly, the interactions between pairs of particles are both conservative and nonconservative; the latter represents, among others, birth/death rates. The ‘forcing term’ does not express a ‘classical’ force exerted by the external world on the particles, but a more general influence on the effects of mutual interactions of particles, for instance, climate changes, that increase or decrease the different agricultural productions at different times, thus altering the economic relationships between different subsystems, that in turn can be also perturbed by stock market fluctuations, sudden wars, periodic epidemics, and so on. Thus, the interest towards these problems moves the mathematical analysis of the effects of different kinds of forcing terms on solutions to equations governing the collective (that is statistical) behaviour of such nonconservative many-particle systems. In the present paper, we offer a study of the basic mathematical properties of such solutions, along with some numerical simulations to show the effects of forcing terms for a classical prey–predator model in ecology.

The standard approach to applying ray theory to solving Maxwell’s equations in the large wave-number limit involves seeking solutions that have (i) an oscillatory exponential with a phase term that is linear in the wave-number and (ii) has an amplitude profile expressed in terms of inverse powers of that wave-number. The Friedlander–Keller modification includes an additional power of this wave-number in the phase of the wave structure, and this additional term is crucial when analysing certain wave phenomena such as creeping and whispering gallery wave propagation. However, other wave phenomena necessitate a generalisation of this theory. The purposes of this paper are to provide a ‘generalised’ Friedlander–Keller ray ansatz for Maxwell’s equations to obtain a new set of field equations for the various phase terms and amplitude of the wave structure; these are then solved subject to boundary data conforming to wave-fronts that are either specified or general. These examples specifically require this generalisation as they are not amenable to classic ray theory.

In the current work, we study a stochastic parabolic problem. The presented problem is motivated by the study of an idealised electrically actuated MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) device in the case of random fluctuations of the potential difference, a parameter that actually controls the operation of MEMS device. We first present the construction of the mathematical model, and then, we deduce some local existence results. Next for some particular versions of the model, relevant to various boundary conditions, we derive quenching results as well as estimations of the probability for such singularity to occur. Additional numerical study of the problem in one dimension follows, which also allows the further investigation the problem with respect to its quenching behaviour.

In this paper, we consider the existence and stability of singular patterns in a fractional Ginzburg–Landau equation with a mean field. We prove the existence of three types of singular steady-state patterns (double fronts, single spikes, and double spikes) by solving their respective consistency conditions. In the case of single spikes, we prove the stability of single small spike solution for sufficiently large spatial period by studying an explicit non-local eigenvalue problem which is equivalent to the original eigenvalue problem. For the other solutions, we prove the instability by using the variational characterisation of eigenvalues. Finally, we present the results of some numerical computations of spike solutions based on the finite difference methods of Crank–Nicolson and Adams–Bashforth.

Narrow escape and narrow capture problems which describe the average times required to stop the motion of a randomly travelling particle within a domain have applications in various areas of science. While for general domains, it is known how the escape time decreases with the increase of the trap sizes, for some specific 2D and 3D domains, higher-order asymptotic formulas have been established, providing the dependence of the escape time on the sizes and locations of the traps. Such results allow the use of global optimisation to seek trap arrangements that minimise average escape times. In a recent paper (Iyaniwura (2021) SIAM Rev. 63(3), 525–555), an explicit size- and trap location-dependent expansion of the average mean first passage time (MFPT) in a 2D elliptic domain was derived. The goal of this work is to systematically seek global minima of MFPT for $1\leq N\leq 50$ traps in elliptic domains using global optimisation techniques and compare the corresponding putative optimal trap arrangements for different values of the domain eccentricity. Further, an asymptotic formula for the average MFPT in elliptic domains with N circular traps of arbitrary sizes is derived, and sample optimal configurations involving non-equal traps are computed.

In this paper, we consider the time decay of the solutions to some problems arising in strain gradient thermoelasticity. We restrict to the two-dimensional case, and we assume that two dissipative mechanisms are introduced, the temperature and the mass dissipation. First, we show that this problem is well-posed proving that the operator defining it generates a contractive semigroup of linear operators. Then, assuming that the function involving the coupling terms is elliptic, the exponential decay of the solutions is concluded as well as the analyticity of the solutions. Finally, we describe how to obtain the exponential stability in the case of hyperbolic dissipation.