New patterns of travelling waves in the generalized Fisher-Kolmogorov equation

Abstract: We prove the existence and uniqueness of a family of travelling waves in a degenerate (or singular) quasilinear parabolic problem that may be regarded as a generalization of the semilinear Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovski-Piscounov equation for the advance of advantageous genes in biology. Depending on the relation between the nonlinear diffusion and the nonsmooth reaction function, which we quantify precisely, we investigate the shape and asymptotic properties of travelling waves. Our method is based on comparison results for semilinear ODEs.