A Critical Value for the Viscosity Coefficient: Triggering Oscillatory Traveling Waves in the Pseudo-parabolic Fisher-KPP Equation

Abstract: The pseudo-parabolic term $u_{xxt}$ serves as a canonical example of higher-order viscosity that provides effective regularization while capturing the refined physical mechanism. How it alters the dynamics of prototype equations remains a fundamental issue, which is not yet fully understood. The goal of this paper is to show that this term induces a sharp transition in traveling wave structure, via studying the pseudo-parabolic Fisher-KPP equation $u_t - τu_{xxt} = D u_{xx} + u(1-u).$ We completely characterize how the parameter ratio $τ/D$ acts as a critical switch: it preserves the monotonic structure of classical traveling waves when $τ/D \leq 1$, yet it triggers a qualitative shift to oscillatory traveling waves when $τ/D > 1$. Numerical simulations support these findings. The threshold $τ/D=1$ thus captures the dual role of the pseudo-parabolic term: it acts as a structure-preserving viscosity when small, but when large it reflects dominant capillary hysteresis, generating the oscillations that explain the saturation overshoot, a phenomenon that contradicts classical diffusion models yet is widely observed in two-phase flow.