Mesa-type patterns in the one-dimensional Brusselator and their stability

The Brusselator is a generic reaction-diffusion model for a tri-molecular chemical reaction. We consider the case when the input and output reactions are slow. In this limit, we show the existence of K-periodic, spatially bi-stable structures, mesas, and study their stability. Using singular perturbation techniques, we find a threshold for the stability of K mesas. This threshold occurs in the regime where the exponentially small tails of the localized structures start to interact. By comparing our results with Turing analysis, we show that, in the generic case, a Turing instability is followed by a slow coarsening process whereby logarithmically many mesas are annihilated before the system reaches a steady equilibrium state. We also study a "breather"-type instability of a mesa, which occurs due to a Hopf bifurcation. Full numerical simulations are shown to confirm the analytical results. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.