Travelling Waves for Adaptive Grid Discretizations of Reaction Diffusion Systems II: Linear Theory

In this paper we consider an adaptive spatial discretization scheme for the Nagumo PDE. The scheme is a commonly used spatial mesh adaptation method based on equidistributing the arclength of the solution under consideration. We assume that this equidistribution is strictly enforced, which leads to the non-local problem with infinite range interactions that we derived in Hupkes and Van Vleck (J Dyn Differ Equ 28:955, 2016). For small spatial grid-sizes, we establish some useful Fredholm properties for the operator that arises after linearizing our system around the travelling wave solutions to the original Nagumo PDE. In particular, we perform a singular perturbation argument to lift these properties from the natural limiting operator. This limiting operator is a spatially stretched and twisted version of the standard second order differential operator that is associated to the PDE waves.