Spiky Steady States of a Chemotaxis System with Singular Sensitivity

This paper is concerned with the steady state problem of a chemotaxis model with singular sensitivity function in a one dimensional spatial domain. Using the chemotactic coefficient \(\chi \) as the bifurcation parameter, we perform local and global bifurcation analysis for the model. It is shown that positive monotone steady states exist as long as \(\chi \) is larger than the first bifurcation value \(\bar{\chi }_1.\) We further obtain asymptotic profiles of these steady states, as \(\chi \) becomes large. In particular, our results show that the cell density function forms a spike, which models the important physical phenomenon of cell aggregation.