Spectrum of the M5-traveling waves

Abstract

In this paper, we study the essential spectrum of the operator obtained by linearizing at traveling waves that occur in the one-dimensional version of the M5-model for mesenchymal cell movement inside a directed tissue made up of highly aligned fibers. We show that traveling waves are spectrally unstable in L2(ℝ; ℂ3) as the essential spectrum includes the imaginary axis. Tools in the proof include exponential dichotomies and Fredholm properties. We prove that a weighted space Lw2(ℝ; ℂ3) with the same function for the tree variables of the linearized operator is no suitable to shift the essential spectrum to the left of the imaginary axis. We find a pair of appropriate weight functions whereby on the weighted space Lwα2(ℝ; ℂ2) × Lwε2(ℝ; ℂ) the essential spectrum lies on {Reλ<0}, outside the imaginary axis.