Dynamics for a two-phase free boundary system in an epidemiological model with couple nonlocal dispersals

The present paper is devoted to the investigation of the long time dynamics for a double free boundary system with nonlocal diffusions, which models the infectious diseases transmitted via digestive system such as fecal-oral diseases, cholera, hand-foot and mouth, etc... We start by proving the existence and uniqueness of the Cauchy problem, which is not a trivial step due to presence of couple nonlocal dispersals and new types of nonlinear reaction terms. Next, we provide simple conditions on comparing the basic reproduction numbers R-0 and R* with 1 to characterize the global dynamics, as t -> infinity, We further obtain the sharp criteria for the spreading and vanishing in term of the initial data. This is also called the vanishing-spreading phenomena. The couple dispersals yield significant obstacle that we cannot employ the approach of Zhao, Zhang, Li, Du [34] and Du-Ni [14]. To overcome this, we must prove the existence and the variational formula for the principal eigenvalue of a linear system with nonlocal dispersals, then use it to obtain the right limits as the dispersal rates and domain tend to zero or infinity. The maximum principle and sliding method for the nonlocal operator are ingeniously employed to achieve the desired results. (c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All reserved.