Abstract
The reaction-diffusion systems which are based on an isothermal autocatalytic chemical reaction involving both an autocatalytic step of the (m + 1)th order (A + mB → (m+1)B) and a decay step of the same order (B → C) have very rich and interesting dynamics. Previous studies in the literature indicate that traveling waves play a key role in understanding these interesting dynamical phenomena. However, there is a lack of rigorous proof of the existence of traveling waves to this system. Here we generalize this isothermal autocatalytic chemical reaction model and provide a rigorous proof of the existence of traveling waves for the resulting reaction-diffusion system which also includes the systems arising from epidemiology and the microbial growth in a flow reactor. © 2010 Brown University.