Pointwise stability of reaction diffusion fronts

Using pointwise semigroup techniques, we establish sharp rates of decay in space and time of a perturbed reaction diffusion front to its time-asymptotic limit. This recovers results of Sattinger, Henry and others of time-exponential convergence in weighted Lp and Sobolev norms, while capturing the new feature of spatial diffusion at Gaussian rate. Novel features of the argument are a pointwise Green function decomposition reconciling spectral decomposition and short-time Nash-Aronson estimates and an instantaneous tracking scheme similar to that used in the study of stability of viscous shock waves.