Characterizing the effect of boundary conditions on striped phases

Abstract

We study the influence of boundary conditions on stationary, periodic patterns in one-dimensional systems. We show how a conceptual understanding of the structure of equilibria in large domains can be based on the characterization of boundary layers through displacement-strain curves. Most prominently, we distinguish wavenumber-selecting and phase-selecting boundary conditions and show how they impact the set of equilibria as the domain size tends to infinity. We illustrate the abstract concepts in the phase-diffusion and the Ginzburg-Landau approximation. We also show how to compute displacement-strain curves in more general systems such as the Swift-Hohenberg equation using continuation methods.

31 pages, 14 figures