Uniqueness of one-dimensional Néel wall profiles

We study the domain wall structure in thin uniaxial ferromagnetic films in the presence of an in-plane applied external field in the direction normal to the easy axis. Using the reduced one-dimensional thin-film micromagnetic model, we analyse the critical points of the obtained non-local variational problem. We prove that the minimizer of the one-dimensional energy functional in the form of the Néel wall is the unique (up to translations) critical point of the energy among all monotone profiles with the same limiting behaviour at infinity. Thus, we establish uniqueness of the one-dimensional monotone Néel wall profile in the considered setting. We also obtain some uniform estimates for general one-dimensional domain wall profiles.

Local accumulation times for source, diffusion, and degradation models in two and three dimensions

We analyze the transient dynamics leading to the establishment of a steady state in reaction-diffusion problems that model several important processes in cell and developmental biology and account for the diffusion and degradation of locally produced chemical species. We derive expressions for the local accumulation time, a convenient characterization of the time scale of the transient at a given location, in two- and three-dimensional systems with first-order degradation kinetics, and analyze their dependence on the model parameters. We also study the relevance of the local accumulation time as a single measure of timing for the transient and demonstrate that, while it may be sufficient for describing the local concentration dynamics far from the source, a more delicate multi-scale description of the transient is needed near a tightly localized source in two and three dimensions.