Front propagation in chaotic and noisy reaction-diffusion systems: a discrete-time map approach

We study the front propagation in reaction-diffusion systems whose reaction dynamics exhibits an unstable fixed point and chaotic or noisy behaviour. We have examined the influence of chaos and noise on the front propagation speed and on the wandering of the front around its average position. Assuming that the reaction term acts periodically in an impulsive way, the dynamical evolution of the system can be written as the convolution between a spatial propagator and a discrete-time map acting locally. This approach allows us to perform accurate numerical analysis. They reveal that in the pulled regime the front speed is basically determined by the shape of the map around the unstable fixed point, while its chaotic or noisy features play a marginal role. In contrast, in the pushed regime the presence of chaos or noise is more relevant. In particular the front speed decreases when the degree of chaoticity is increased, but it is not straightforward to derive a direct connection between the chaotic properties (e.g. the Lyapunov exponent) and the behaviour of the front. As for the fluctuations of the front position, we observe for the noisy maps that the associated mean square displacement grows in time as t ^1/2 in the pushed case and as t ^1/4 in the pulled one, in agreement with recent findings obtained for continuous models with multiplicative noise. Moreover we show that the same quantity saturates when a chaotic deterministic dynamics is considered for both pushed and pulled regimes. Received 17 July 2001