Semi-wave, traveling wave and spreading speed for monostable cooperative systems with nonlocal diffusion and free boundaries

Abstract: We consider a class of cooperative reaction-diffusion systems with free boundaries in one space dimension, where the diffusion terms are nonlocal, given by integral operators involving suitable kernel functions, and they are allowed not to appear in some of the equations in the system. The problem is monostable in nature, resembling the well known Fisher-KPP equation. Such a system covers various models arising from mathematical biology, with the Fisher-KPP equation as the simplest special case, where a "spreading-vanishing" dichotomy is known to govern the long time dynamical behaviour. The question of spreading speed is widely open for such systems except for the scalar case. In this paper, we develop a systematic approach to determine the spreading profile of the system, and obtain threshold conditions on the kernel functions which decide exactly when the spreading has finite speed, or infinite speed (accelerated spreading). This relies on a rather complete understanding of both the associated semi-waves and traveling waves. When the spreading speed is finite, we show that the speed is determined by a particular semi-wave, and obtain sharp estimates of the semi-wave profile and the spreading speed. For kernel functions that behave like $|x|^{-\gamma}$ near infinity, we are able to obtain better estimates of the spreading speed for both the finite speed case, and the infinite speed case, which appear to be the first for this kind of free boundary problems, even for the special Fisher-KPP equation.