Bifurcation in a system of imnteracting fronts (Q2574165)

In this paper it is studied a system consisting of interacting moving fronts, which is derived from the microscopic description of a semiconductor superlattice. The corresponding nonlinear transport equations give rise to the formation of electron accumulation and depletion fronts, which form the boundaries between high- and low-field domains. One of the main results of the present paper asserts that large parts of the bifurcation scenarios of the microscopic model can be reproduced by a model that uses the front positions as the dynamical variables. Under the additional assumption that fronts do not traverse the whole system, the authors obtain a tank model, which explains the basic bifurcations by a set of filling rules for a system of water tanks.