Spectral Analysis of a Transport Operator Arising in Growing Cell Populations

The present paper is concerned with the spectral analysis of a transport-like operator derived from a model introduced by Rotenberg describing the growth of a cell population. Each cell of this population is distinguished by its degree of maturity μ and its maturation velocity v. The biological boundaries of μ = 0 and μ = a (a > 0) are fixed and tightly coupled through mitosis. At mitosis daughter cells and mother cells are related by a general reproduction rule which covers all known biological ones. We first discuss in detail the spectrum of the streaming operator for smooth and partly smooth boundary conditions. Next, we discuss the existence and nonexistence of eigenvalues of the transport operator in the half plane {λ ∈ ℂ : Reλ > \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$- \underline{\sigma } \} $\end{document}where \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$- \underline{\sigma } $\end{document}denotes the spectral bound of the streaming operator. In particular, the strict monotonicity of the leading eigenvalue (when it exists) of the transport operator with respect to different parameters of the equation is also considered. We close the paper by describing in detail the various essential spectra of the transport operator for wide classes of collision and boundary operators.