Regularity of transition fronts in nonlocal dispersal evolution equations

Abstract: It is known that solutions of nonlocal dispersal evolution equations do not become smoother in space as time elapses. This lack of space regularity would cause a lot of difficulties in studying transition fronts in nonlocal equations. In the present paper, we establish some general criteria concerning space regularity of transition fronts in nonlocal dispersal evolution equations with a large class of nonlinearities, which allows the applicability of various techniques for reaction-diffusion equations to nonlocal equation, and hence serves as an initial and fundamental step for further studying various qualitative properties of transition fronts such as stability and uniqueness. We also prove the existence of continuously differentiable and increasing interface location functions, which give a better characterization of the propagation of transition fronts and are of great technical importance.