Abstract:
In 1952 Alan Turing suggested that under certain conditions chemicals can react and diffuse to produce heterogeneous spatial patterns. The most surprising aspect of the Turing mechanism is that diffusion in a reacting chemical system can actually have a destabilizing influence. In this talk I shall introduce the mathematical theory of this phenomenon and demonstrate how a spatially homogeneous and linearly stable steady state of a binary reaction system can be destabilized by introducing diffusion with sufficiently different diffusivities for the two chemicals