Travelling Waves in Partially Degenerate Reaction-Diffusion Systems

We study the existence and some properties of travelling waves in partially degenerate reaction-diffusion systems. Such systems may for example describe intracellular calcium dynamics in the presence of immobile buffers. In order to prove the wave existence, we first consider the non degenerate case and then pass to the limit as some of the diffusion coefficient converge to zero. The passage to the limit is based on a priori estimates of solutions independent of the values of the diffusion coefficients. The wave uniqueness is also proved.