Uniform exponential decay for reaction-diffusion systems with complex-balanced mass-action kinetics : dedicated to Bernold Fiedler on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday

Abstract

We consider reaction-diffusion systems on a bounded domain with no-flux boundary conditions. All reactions are given by the mass-action law and are assumed to satisfy the complex-balance condition. In the case of a diagonal diffusion matrix, the relative entropy is a Liapunov functional. We give an elementary proof for the Liapunov property as well a few explicit examples for the condition of complex or detailed balancing. We discuss three methods to obtain energy-dissipation estimates, which guarantee exponential decay of the relative entropy, all of which rely on the log-Sobolev estimate and suitable handling of the reaction terms as well as the mass-conservation relations. The three methods are (i) a convexification argument based on the authors joint work with Haskovec and Markowich, (ii) a series of analytical estimates derived by Desvillettes, Fellner, and Tang, and (iii) a compactness argument of developed by Glitzky and Hünlich.