Nonlinear stability of periodic wave trains in the FitzHugh-Nagumo system against fully nonlocalized perturbations

Abstract

Recently, a nonlinear stability theory has been developed for wave trains in reaction-diffusion systems relying on pure $L^\infty$-estimates. In the absence of localization of perturbations, it exploits diffusive decay caused by smoothing together with spatio-temporal phase modulation. In this paper, we advance this theory beyond the parabolic setting and propose a scheme designed for general dissipative semilinear problems. We present our method in the context of the FitzHugh-Nagumo system. The lack of parabolicity and localization complicates mode filtration in $L^\infty$-spaces using the Floquet-Bloch transform. Instead, we employ the inverse Laplace representation of the semigroup generated by the linearization to uncover high-frequency damping, while leveraging a novel link to the Floquet-Bloch representation for the smoothing low-frequency part. Another challenge arises in controlling regularity in the quasilinear iteration scheme for the modulated perturbation. We address this by extending the method of nonlinear damping estimates to nonlocalized perturbations using uniformly local Sobolev norms.